There Goes Those Fancy eBook Aspirations from Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon: 100,000’s of FREE eBooks from the Public Library
Courtesy of Reggie Middleton, writing at Zero Hedge
Sometimes the best laid plans can be put out to pasture due to a lack of foresight in regards to the ever changing, liquid landscape known as the Internet. What fascinates me so much about the Web is that it is the great democratizer, it brings down the barriers to entry and allows for unfettered information flow. For instance, who would have thought that your local public library could lay low the massive aspirations media and retail titans such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple? Put simply, why would you buy an eReader from these vendors for several hundred dollars, then go ahead and spend more money buying the eBooks for said reader when you can simply download the books from your local public library’s website into the equipment you already have? Okay, I know why those Apple heads would do it – because they want to spend money on Apple products,,, the eBooks may look cooler with that shiny Apple logo-thingy indicating that you too have donated unnecessarily to the Steve Jobs’ enrichment fund, but how about the rest of the vendors???
As a matter of fact, you can kill several birds with one stone simply by buying one of the recent Android phones. Google is really on to something here, and the growth potential of Android is simply phenomenal. When those Android tablets get moving at Kmart for $100… Whoops, there goes that Amazon Digital eBook business model.
Attention Kmart shoppers: $149 Android tablet on aisle 5 : The Android OS isn’t just powering high end smartphones, it also runs barebones tablets sold at Kmart for the price of an iPod nano.
Think about this! Hundreds of thousands of titles freely and legally downloadable from your local public library to play on your $150 tablet with standard ports, HD video, the whole 9 yards, or maybe just on your cell phone. Android can scale pretty high in the capability department and reach rather low in the price category as well.
NY’ers, check this out from your NYC Public Libraries:
These books use DRM protection administered by Overdrive. Guess what platforms they won’t play on (okay, I’ll spoil it for you – the two front runners in the space – Apple’s iPAd and Amazon’s Kindle!). Of course you can always pick up one of those Android phones, or even a Microsoft Windows 7 phone…
DRM-protected Adobe® EPUB & PDF eBooks work with most computers… |
|||
 |
Windows® desktop, laptop &
|
 |
Mac® desktop & laptop
|
DRM-protected Adobe EPUB & PDF eBooks work with these devices… |
|||
|
DRM-protected Adobe EPUB & PDF eBooks are incompatible with these devices…
|
More on the Creatively Destructive Pace of Technology Innovation
- There Is Another Paradigm Shift Coming in Technology and Media: Apple, Microsoft and Google Know its Winner Takes All
- The Mobile Computing and Content Wars: Part 2, the Google Response to the Paradigm Shift
- An Introduction to How Apple Apple Will Compete With the Google/Android Onslaught
- Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Ultra-Mobile Computing Wars Just Yet
- This article should drive the point home: An iPhone 4 Recall Will Hurt Apple More By Opening Additional Opportunity for Android Devices Than Increased Expenses
- A First in the Mainstream Media: Apple’s Flagship Product Loses In a Comparison Review to HTC’s Google-Powered Phone
- After Getting a Glimpse of the New Windows Phone 7 Functionality, RIMM is Looking More Like a Short Play
- Android is gaining preference as the long-term choice of application developers
- A Glimpse of the BoomBustBlog Internal Discussion Concerning the Fate of Apple
- Math and the Pace of Smart Phone Innovation May Take a Byte Out of Apple’s (Short-lived?) Dominance
- Apple on the Margin
- RIM Smart Phone Market Share, RIP?
- Motorola, the Company That INVENTED the Cellphone is Trying to Uninvent the iPad With Android
- Android Now Outselling iOS? Explaining the Game of Chess That Google Plays in the Smart Phone Space
