David Pogue: Barnes & Noble’s e-book effort still ‘1.0’
In his New York Times column and video blog today, David Pogue looks at the differences between Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s e-book offerings and finds Barnes & Noble wanting. (Well, actually he finds them both wanting, but B&N slightly more so than Amazon.)
Among other things, Pogue dings Barnes & Noble for not having a Kindle-like dedicated reader yet, disguising a lesser selection of recent titles with 500,000 poorly-OCR’d Google public domain books, and being more expensive than Amazon on most of the e-books that people would actually want to read.
He also has some critical things to say about the industry as a whole—the inability to pass on purchased books to other people, and the lack of sought-after titles like the Harry Potter books on any platform—and notes a few shortcomings with the various Barnes & Noble Mac and PC apps. (In the video blog, he is able to demonstrate some of these.)
Pogue doesn’t mention that Barnes & Noble’s reader is derived from Fictionwise’s eReader—and I know full well he’s been aware of eReader since it was the Peanut Reader. Perhaps he doesn’t want to confuse people. It’s a bit funny to see eReader go from being the best-of-breed reading software for the iPhone to stacking up poorly against the Kindle with only a change of branding.
I hope Barnes & Noble continues to improve, but I also hope that the problems B&N is having do not spill over onto Fictionwise’s own Fictionwise and eReader stores. We’ll just have to wait and see how the Plastic Logic reader works. (Here’s hoping B&N doesn’t follow suit after Amazon and lock out non-B&N titles even if they’re in the eReader format.)
August 6th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I believe the unavailability of the Harry Potter books has nothing to do with the publishers but with the author, who, after all, owns the copyright.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
And another thing: how is a dedicated device tied to a single retailer a good thing for the consumer?
August 6th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I doubt anyone wants a device that’s tied only to B&N, but to still not have a single e-book device capable of handling the ereader format in mid-2009 is a disgrace. Sometime next year is just not good enough.
I’ve bought hundreds of ereader books in recent years because in my opinion they have the fairest DRM scheme of all the formats. But it’s been almost a year since I moved to an e-ink reader and the only way I can use all those ereader titles with e-ink is to crack the encryption and convert them to epub.
Naturally I’ve stopped buying titles in ereader format and since many of the titles are not available in epub at Fictionwise I’m forced to buy elsewhere. It’s a shame, I’d still prefer to do business with these guys, but they’ve just failed to get their act together in a timely fashion.