Saturday, June 11, 2011

Telefonica Launches eBook Reader

WSJ reporting:
Spain’s Telefonica next week is slated to become the latest in a series of European telecom companies that have launched their own eBook reader. The rationale? They’d rather get a piece of this business before Kindle Or iPad do.
...In other markets, eBooks have been slower to arrive. Western Europe accounted for just 7% of eBook shipments in 2010, ABI Research says, and the picture is similar in much of the developing world, where piracy worries still loom larger for publishers and authors. That means there is still hope for the likes of Telefonica.
Telefonica’s Movistar eBook bq will launch in Spain at €169, a price similar to that of Amazon’s Kindle, which makes sense because the device’s capabilities, at least on paper, are very much like Kindle’s.
...At launch, Telefonica’s eBook reader will have only classic, out-of-copyright books. Telefonica says talks with Spanish-language publishers may result in deals with some of them in September, but the relative shortage of eBooks in European languages—a problem for Kindle on these shores—may be a problem for Telefonica too.

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/06/10/telefonica-launches-ebook-reader/?mod=google_news_blog

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