Otaku Gadgets

Borders has announced that they are getting their own e-book reader soon and it will be made by the Canadian company called Kobo. It will be a much cheaper reader than the main competition — namely the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad. In the U.S. it will cost $149.99 and Borders has already started taking pre-orders. Availability as of now is June 17.

The price difference will ensure that a lot of people who are looking to get something cheap on the go will fall for it. There is nothing in the marketing material that shows it to be something it is not. It is definitely a cheap e-Book reader but when it comes to e-book selection, it is very likely to have more choice than the Apple iBook Store as rightly pointed out by TUAW. Even if it is only because Borders has announced that they will have a ‘million’ books up very soon and Apple still says they have ‘tens of thousands’ and almost half of them are available through Project Gutenberg. Meaning they are already on the public domain. Really old books of which some are classics and the others are mostly literary texts and utter nonsensical gibberish. But Apple is very likely to remedy that soon. It is well known that the iPad maker is in talks with the biggest publishers in the industry, wooing them with the iPad.

Borders also announced that mobile apps will be accompanying the Kobo reader. There’s in fact already an iPhone app from Kobo on the iPhone  and the promise says that there will be laptop and desktop versions as well for Macs to accompany the mobile app and the physical device. So basically we will have an iPhone app with a companion OS X app.

The Kobo app is not connected to the Borders ebook store as of now but it seems like a future update will fix that issue.

Even though the device itself is much cheaper than the mainstream established alternatives, the ebooks themselves have no way to be cheap on the platform. Most of the publishers have already put their foot down on how they want their books to be sold online and they are not going to cut anyone any slack about pricing. Need I remind you of the hot and cold wars between Amazon and the various major publishers just a while ago? The dust is yet to settle on that one.

Whether or not it is a good idea to bring about new eBook reader models in to the market right now, is something that only time can tell. But there’s one thing that I will draw your attention to — both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are trying to do something extra. Amazon with their Kindle Development kit and B&N with their Android based touchscreen, are both trying to desperately to add to the tired formula. The others, like Sony and Cool-r are not doing very well. So at this point, even a significantly cheaper eBook reader might not do all that well.

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