Borders Store Vs Kindle Store: Can Borders Area-e Initiative Beat The Kindle Store
By Best-eReaders, July 28, 2010
Borders Group is quite late to the ebook business. Amazon has already a head start of 2 years, Sony and a B&N has about a year, and Apple’s iBooks has about 4 months. This means Borders will be covering a lot of ground if it wishes to match up to rival bookstores. The company announced they are targeting a modest 17% share of the market by the second half of 2011. Is this a realistic and feasible goal?
Let’s take a look at the efforts Borders is making.
Borders Store vs Kindle Store: Borders Strategies
Borders aims to leverage their market share of eBooks by:
1. Making Borders Store device-neutral.
Device neutrality allows books on the Kobo Store to work with a variety of devices. Consumers have greater freedom in reading content on the device of their choosing.
Kobo Books can be read on: Astak, B&N Nook, BeBook, BeBook, Booken, COOL-ER, Elonex, Hanlin, IREX, Neolux, and Sony eReaders. Also, Kobo has apps for Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, PC, and Mac.
2. Launching Area-e or eBook sections in Border stores.
Borders Group has more than 508 brick-and-mortar stores in the US and 3 in Puerto Rico, and also has dozens of airport stores. In their bid to raise the market presence of Kobo eReaders, the company is setting up an ebook section called “Area-e” in its superstores. In these e-book sections, consumers can sit and try out Border’s selection of eReaders (which include Kobo, Sony, and Aluratek Libre models). They can also preview eBooks before buying them. (This isn’t much of an advantage since Kindle also allows free pre-purchase sampling of eBooks).
The greater advantage of Borders over Kindle, though, is its strong international presence. Borders has retail presence in Canada and various European and Asian countries. The Kobo device is also said to support over 180 languages.
Borders Store vs Kindle Store: What Borders Really Need to Do to Beat the Kindle
1. Match the Kindle Store’s eBook Range.
The newly launced Borders Store boasts of 1.5 million titles. This figure already takes into account the thousands of free public domain titles from the Internet Archive. Some reports say that the Kobo Store has about 200,000 paid titles only.
The Kindle Store, on the other hand, has more than 2.4 million titles. You take out the 1.8 million out-of-copyright titles that can be downloaded for free, and that still leaves you more than 620,000 paid titles.
2. Improve looks of the Kobo Store.
Compared to the Kindle, the Kobo eBookstore rather looks plain.
3. Make prices of eBooks more competitive.
eBook prices on the Borders Store range from $0.79 cents to $18 or more. The Kobo Store is on par with Amazon Store with regards to prices of agency model books. When it comes to non-agency model books, however, Amazon holds the better prices. For instance, Stephen King’s Under the Dome costs $9.99 only in the Kindle Store, but costs $16.99 in the Borders Store.
4. Set up a direct link between the Kobo eReader and the Kobo Store.
The convenience of book shopping and buying that the Kindle eReader offers is greatly amiss in the Kobo ecosystem.
Closing Thought
Borders is the last major bookseller in the US to launch an eBook house. Can it still beat Amazon, which has a head start of about 2 years? The answer is a tentative yes, for its success depends on the strategies it will be making in the next months. This means the company needs to do more than simply launching an eBook section in its physical stores. What’s more important is that Borders should strive to provide the broadest range of ebooks at the most competitive prices.
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