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Re: Barnes & Noble Fire Nook Engineering Staff

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On 2/10/14 8:02 PM, wjwlsn wrote:

>
>In other (related?) news, Sony just decided to shutdown their ebook store (in North America) and send people to Kobo.


In a way, that's awful news.  I've got a Nook (simple touch, the cheap one)
 and love it. I've probably bought 40 books from B&N since I got it, and I
 chose the Nook for three reasons:

1. It's not Amazon.  I like and use Amazon, but worry about them getting a
 monopoly on the business, and it seems they're damned close already.

2. It uses epub as a format, while Amazon uses its own somewhat proprietary
 format.  Epub is a ridiculously open standard with lots of toolchains to
 produce them.  You can even easily go from LaTeX to Epub in about 2 steps.
  Amazon's format requires you use Amazon's toolchain, and the tools that
 produce Mobi format aren't great, in my opinion.

3. Even DRMed epubs from Barnes&Noble are ridiculously easy to crack.
  Calibre even provides a plugin.

I'd heard Barnes was going to get out of the hardware business, as it
 generated a huge loss for them.  Maybe that's not the end of the world, as
 you can buy other ereaders or use the Nook app on your Android/iOS tablet.
  But I'd be very upset to find Barnes getting out of the ebook business
 entirely, as it puts Amazon that much closer to world domination.

In America at least, we're not far away from a world where a few huge and
 powerful companies each have a monopoly on a sector (Walmart, Amazon,
 Apple) and very few ISPs.  That's a world I won't like or want to live in.

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Barnes & Noble Fire Nook Wngineering Staff TrueSatan <true_satan@fastmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-10 19:42 +0000
  Re: Barnes & Noble Fire Nook Wngineering Staff wjwlsn <ibillwilson@gmail.com> - 2014-02-10 12:02 -0800
    Re: Barnes & Noble Fire Nook Engineering Staff RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-11 08:50 +0000

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