Kobo Mini/Glo/Touch Triparison (Good E-Reader)

The eBook: Deja Vu all Over Again? (Tech Crunch)

Changes for Retailers as eBook Revolution Moves Abroad (Paid Content)

Hands-on with the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (ZDnet)

Kindle Daily Deal: Mariana by Susanna Kearsley {and} Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo

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1 COMMENT

  1. Inglis: I would suggest that Kindle’s biesggt growth in the next two years (2012-13) will be *outside* the US. And european ebook adoption will be the key. Basically I think they will face *less* meaningful opposition overseas than locally. B&N do face some soul searching but they have been giving Amazon a serious challenge and likely will continue to do so even if their new-reader market share likely has peaked.Elsewhere, things look better for Amazon:The entry level K4 is already showing up on some international Amazon sites and the (renamed) Keyboard Kindle is everywhere. Even without the lubrication of the special offers, the K4 at US$109 (or equivalent) seriously undercuts most competitors especialy since Amazon doesn’t normally follow tradition and charge significantly more to european customers. Given that Amazon is steadily planting local Kindle stores all over (UK and Germany in place, France next week, Spain and Italy some time after that ) and there is nothing like B&N to mount a broad-based challenge, Amazon will be free to take its time and hit each market in force in order of size and content availability. Its a bit more work to hit 50 small to medium markets than one big one, but with the big one safely in hand the resources to play elsewhere won’t be lacking.I know Europe is supposed to be epub-phillic territory and the Sony brand still carries clout there but the same was true of the UK before the local Kindle store opened up. With ebook adoption rates under 2% on average I suspect the other 98% of those markets will behave a bit differently than the early adopters. (Otherwise, they too would be early adopters. ) And the biesggt difference is that newcomers will care less than early adopters about specs and standards and way more about content and price.Now, I do agree that Kobo is following a rational policy in expanding globally and doing so through partnerships, which gives them a good chance to be a solid #2 worldwide eventually, but in doing so they are going to be stressing the much smaller local independents feeding the early adopter’s generic Adept ecosystem who will find themselves caught in a 3-way squeeze between Kobo, Amazon, and Apple. (iBooks is an afterthought in the US, but it covers some 36 countries already, so it’s bound to have some impact, especially since it peddles non-Adept epub.) The problem is that, like B&N, Kobo doesn’t have the resources to hit 50 markets as fast as Amazon can, even with local allies. So Kobo is likely to expand more slowly than Amazon and their gains are more likely to come from consolidating the existing epub camp around the Kobo stores than from the format agnostic bargain hunters more likely to buy into Kindle. Since I don’t think it is wise to bet against cheaper , I expect there will be more of the latter than the former. Again, content and price trumps specs and standards.Simple test:Both Kobo and Kindle have german ebookstores open and the Kobo reader will hit there in a few weeks. It shouldn’t take more than a few months after that to see how it plays out betwen them.And then we’ll see how the other 98% behaves.Who knows? Maybe they’ll just yawn.

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