December 13, 2011
Choose Your eReader: Compare and Contrast
by Paul Oliver
Amazon’s declaration of war on brick & mortar stores has lead to many powerful and creative responses from retailers. None though, so cleverly efficient as this chart (DOWNLOAD THE PDF), which is easily my favorite response to date.
This amazing distilation of Amazon’s world view came to us courtesy of Bruce Dadey, a bookseller who works in Guelph, Ontario. It charts the various retail options consumers will have access to based on their choice of eReader.
Bruce created it in hopes that fellow booksellers might put it up in their stores and share it via email. You can get the full image by downloading the PDF.
Paul Oliver is the marketing manager of Melville House. Previously he was co-owner of Wolfgang Books in Philadelphia.
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6 Comments
This is exactly why I will not own a Kindle.
I have a Sony reader and want to transfer my books to my Nook. Does anyone know how to do that?
This is ridiculous. Are you implying that you can’t get books onto a kindle via a source other than Amazon? I have kindle, nook and sony readers and read mostly on my kindle and have many sources of books. I only occasionally purchase ebooks from Amazon. I’m on this site to look for ebooks from Melville House after seeing an article in the NY Times today.
Yes. You can transfer books to the nook but you can’t transfer B&N ebooks from Nook to Sony because of B&N’s restrictions in their DRM.
Connect your Sony to your computer and save your Sony epub books to a folder that you can find. Connect your Nook to the computer and drop the ebook files to the documents folder of your Nook.
Hi
Marti;
There
were three main things I wanted to illustrate with the diagram and its
Open/Shut theme (I apologize in advance for the length of my reply, but a
picture is worth a thousand words, and here are the words instead of the
picture):
1. Google (along with some publishers) partners with
independent bookstores, giving them access to an exploding eBook market that
will be important, maybe even essential, to their survival. Amazon does not. Therefore
Google offers you the option of supporting hundreds of local bookstores, while
Amazon leaves you the option of supporting Amazon only. The arguments for
supporting indie bookstores are well known: they provide exposure for emerging
and local authors, respond in a personalized way to the needs of local readers,
enrich local culture by hosting readings and other arts events that bring people
together, and keep money in the community by employing local people, purchasing
from neighboring businesses, and paying taxes. Amazon does none of that. While
cost and instant availability trump these arguments for some people (though see
below), many people have a broader perspective on how their buying choices
affect their local community. My overall goal was to make people aware of how
their eReader purchase might affect the viability of their local bookstore.
2. Amazon is actively trying to shut down
local bookstores by driving book prices down below what independents (or even
Amazon, in the long term) can sustain. Because of its size, Amazon is able to muscle
publishers into giving it discounts that independent booksellers can’t obtain,
and because it sells everything from shoes to chainsaws, Amazon is able to support
its practice of selling books and eReaders not just at a discount, but at a
loss. Price competition is good for consumers, and because it promotes
efficiency, it can be good for businesses as well. But when a large corporation
temporarily prices its products in a way that eliminates all competition by
smaller players, the long-term result is loss of local businesses, monopolization,
and lack of consumer options. (Surely you don’t think Amazon will sell eBooks
and Kindles for below cost when they’re the only seller left standing? Remember what happened to your Netflix rates shortly after Blockbuster Video folded?) There
are hundreds of towns now whose local bookseller has shut its doors. Again, there
may be people who don’t care whether they have a local bookshop, but many
people may have made other buying choices if they had known that they would be
losing their community bookstore. And given that many indie bookstores are evolving and
adapting by offering their customers eBooks, I hope the poster will encourage
people who want to keep their local bookstore open, or who want to support an
independent bookstore in their general area rather than Amazon, to buy an
eReader that allows them to purchase eBooks locally.
3. Finally, there are indeed technical
limitations associated with Kindles and Amazon’s proprietary eBook format that
are intended to restrict consumers to Amazon products. Barnes and Noble, Apple,
and Sony all have their own eBookstores, but if you buy a Google eBook from a
local bookseller, you can still read it on a Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, and on dozens of
other eReaders. For anything other than the iPad, which will use its built-in eReader, you
just download Adobe Digital Editions to the device for free. Not so for a Kindle,
which still doesn’t support the internationally-standard EPUB format in which
Google eBooks and most other non-Amazon eBooks are published. You can convert
EPUB books to Amazon’s proprietary MOBI format with programs such as Calibre,
but if the EPUB book has digital rights management (DRM) on it—and most books
you pay for will—you can’t convert it without stripping away the DRM first,
which is legally questionable. Similarly, the Kindle’s Terms of Agreement state
that you cannot legally bypass DRM or read an Amazon eBook on a device other than those
Amazon approves, and Amazon does not distribute apps that allow its books to be
read on other eReaders. I suspect that the non-Amazon books you are reading on
your Kindle are free, non-DRM eBooks that are either in a Kindle-friendly
format or are convertible to a Kindle format. You won’t be able to convert or
read an eBook purchased from an indie bookstore directly on your Kindle,
though, unless it’s a Kindle Fire and you’re accessing the Google eBookstore online
via your browser. If your experience is otherwise, I’d be interested to hear
it.
It wasn’t my intention to demonize people who buy at
Amazon, but rather to simply make readers aware of the consequences of their
buying decisions when it comes to eReaders, particularly those people who are
interested in keeping their local bookstore open. I’d be very happy if Amazon
would open up its eReaders and books so that they could compete on quality and selection
instead of trying to shut consumers into a closed system or undermine indies via strategic underpricing. Ultimately, though, it’s consumers who are
the last line of defence for indie bookstores, and their choices now will
determine how much choice they’ll have in the future.
Happy Holidays to you and yours.
Sorry for the poetry-like line breaks in my lengthy response below; the text looked OK when I pasted it into the comment box!