
How to beat Amazon's Kindle. - peter123
http://slate.com/id/2226503
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simanyay
Single-page version: <http://www.slate.com/id/2226503/pagenum/all/>

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mattmaroon
It's not fair to compare advertising bucks on an apples to apples basis.
Amazon has something on their store below every book which is available for
the Kindle (which is most of them by sales volume) saying "Available on
Kindle". The cash value of those ads would be enormous, far, far more than
Sony has spent I'm sure.

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msluyter
I've resisted the Kindle due to its DRM and whatnot, and up till now, the Sony
device didn't have much appeal either. But I'm quite interested the ability to
"check out" books from the New York public library and to read Google Books in
epub format. Those may be the killer features I've been waiting for.

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technomancy
Many of the Google Books titles are already available for free for Kindle
usage from sites like FeedBooks.com; it's quite easy to download those titles
over the air.

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anurag
FeedBooks has less than 3000 'official' books (mostly public-domain titles)
and around 600 user-submitted books; over a million Google Books can be read
on the Sony Reader. However, the OCR quality of ePub content from Google is
spotty. I believe all books on FeedBooks have been proofread.

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simanyay
I'd go with the second lesson. Kindle makes it really easy to buy a new book:
you don't need computer or even wifi network, just hit the button.

I wonder if it is a good idea for rivals to create a market with one point-of-
entry but different sellers. Think of, well, Amazon for anything but e-books.

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simanyay
On a second thought, such an open market will make price-unification
impossible. And that is Kindle's another strong point.

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antipaganda
Why is price-unification good? Price-competition is better for consumers.

