Once again Mighty Amazon beats one of its competitors. Great news for the Amazon share holders, lousy news for the rest of us. Whilst the Kindle is a perfectly reasonable ereader, it is definitely not the best, but owing to the enormous power of Amazon, it is steadily killing off all its competitors.
The most recent being Barnes and Noble’s Nook ereader in the UK. This ereader, which is a perfectly reasonable device, but which suffers from being an arm of a far from successful book seller (Barnes and Noble) is now pulled from the UK market. Not only the hardware (the ereader itself), but Barnes and Noble have also abandoned their various ereader apps that are made for the UK market, and what is worse, have also stopped supporting their customers to the extent of selling their entire customer support system to Sainsburys ( a large supermarket chain in the UK), which means, and I quote from a release from Barnes and Noble:-
“Nook has partnered with award-winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to the vast majority of your purchased Nook Books at no new cost to you.”
Please not that phrase “vast majority”, that is a lousy deal for Nook owners, as it implies that they will no longer have access to all the ebooks they have purchased from Barnes and Noble for their Nook ereaders.
A further implication to this situation is that yet one more non-Kindle ereader is busily biting the dust. And as the Kindle uses a unique format for its ebooks, it makes it even less attractive for ebook publishers to bother to produce their ebooks in formats other than the Kindle one.
Of course there are conversion programs such as Calibre out there, which make it easy to convert ebooks from one format to another, but not all ereader users are computer savvy enough to use such software, nor should they be.
Basically, any reduction in competition for Amazon and its Kindle is bad news for the reading public, so everyone, please support the remaining non-Kindle ereaders out there… they need your help!!!!
OZTHOUGHTS 