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enTourage eDGe opens ebook store
November 20, 2009 | 11:05 am
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By Paul Biba
The capital-letter-challenged eDGe is now offering ebooks in their new store. They have cut a deal with Ingram Digital for ebooks and with LibreDigital to provide ebooks and over 175 periodicals. They are also connected with the Google Books for download from that source.
I poked around their store and it seems that all the books I looked at were in PDF format – not very reader friendly – even though the machine will read EPUB. However, the ereading part of the unit is 9.7″ so maybe it can do a decent PDF display. There is no mention that I can find of whether the books have DRM or not. We have previously reported on the unit here.
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Comments:
They are selling ebooks from US publishers that only come with DRM. For example Wolf Hall is also on sale at Books on Board as an “Adobe Digital Edition”, i.e. a PDF with Adobe DRM. BoB also sells an Adobe ePub version of this ebook, so enTourage is deliberately choosing PDF over ePub.
Not just US publishers, but they’re definitely choosing PDF or ePub.
I have one ebook in distribution with Ingram (through Lightning Source), as ePub only. They list it with the correct ISBN, but give Media Format as PDF, and claim “Coming Soon”. (Although, oddly, they also list “Availability: In stock”!)
http://www.entourageedge.com/desbarollda-the-waltzing-mouse.html
Oh – on the DRM. I wish I could avoid it, but it seems that currently books distributed through Lightning Source are required to have DRM
So the DRM on the Edge booksmight only reflect that most of them are sourced from Ingram Digital.
What about the prices? The difference of prices between kindle and this store is outrageous. For instance, check superfreakonomics in both stores.
I guess that this is a matter of exclusivities. For sure, Amazon is going to play with prices in order to kill the competence as far as they can.