In the last 8 years or so, I’ve regularly looked at the ebook market to figure out if they’ve fixed it yet. In 2015 I can say: no, they haven’t. But there is a new star on the horizon, at least.
Let’s start with a harmless example: Out of the five sci-fi ebooks that Kobo recommends for 2014, they refuse to sell you three. They claim that the books are not available in your country, Switzerland in my case. However, if you check out the competition, you notice that even newcomers to the ebook market like Thalia/Orell Füssli have the ebooks. What’s even worse, Amazon will not hestitate to sell all those five books to you for Kindle.
So here we have Kobo, a company that claims to make premium ebook readers and offer one of the largest ebook collections in the world, unable to fulfill something that both their biggest competitor and complete newbies at this game can do. This shouldn’t be that way — if one company can offer an ebook in one territory, all the others should be able to do that, too.
On the DRM front, things are still broken as well. By far most ebooks are sold with DRM. Fortunately, some countries allow you to remove that DRM from your books, and I can only thank Apprentice Alf again for all his effort in making DRM cracking tools easy to use.
The broken state of the market means that:
- Amazon remains the supreme ironfisted ruler of all that is ebooks. Nothing can compete with them right now. They appear to be able to even get around publishers’ territorial disputes, and their prices and selection are still better than the competition’s. At the same time, they cheat a dozen countries by not paying their taxes and they treat their employees like cattle, but that’s another story.
- You can achieve a similar selection to Amazon’s if you’re prepared to hunt through two dozen independent ebook stores for the title you want, and pay a little more for it. It will probably come as an Adobe DRM-encrypted ePUB file. Prepare to crack the DRM. If you’re in a country that doesn’t allow that, you’re fucked.
- Publishers and book stores still haven’t managed to find a strategy to kill Amazon, but there is movement on the front. The Deutsche Telekom and a series of German and Italian book store chains are trying with their Tolino alliance, and Tolino has everything it needs to turn into some real competition. The Tolino Cloud that syncs books you uploaded yourself plus books you bought from any Tolino alliance member to all your Tolino devices could be a killer feature.
I don’t know what could be the best interim solution until the market is fixed. Probably buying a Tolino Vision 2 and hunting for books all over, then cracking them and shoving them into your Tolino Cloud Reader so they get synced. You can even buy books from Amazon, crack them and convert them to ePUB using Calibre.
To help your hunting, here are some of my current favorite ebook stores, some even without DRM:
- Starzik (French)
- Immatériel (French, many DRM-free)
- Thalia (German, English, French)
- Kobo (English, French, German)
- La Matière Noire (French, independent)
- Baen Ebooks (English, independent, many DRM-free)
- Feedbooks (English, many DRM-free)
Maybe that helps! See you in two years for an update on the situation.