Question: Should Retailers Own Branded e-Book Device: yea or nay?

Some retailers are opting to make or brand their own e-Book devices. Teleread reports that German booksellers Weltbild and Hugendubell launched their own device recently and following will be Waterstone, expected to launch their e-reader next year.  Bloomsbury executive director Richard Charkin says, “ You need to be able to offer both [e-books and a device] if you are to take any share of the market,” says in the story.   It is also reported that the American Booksellers Association is in talks about making its own device.  Penguin’s vice-president for digital commerce, Tim McCall agrees with this view and said it was necessary for a retailer with a digital strategy to have a reader as part of it, reported in the article.

We picked up on this commentary by Steven Lyle Jordan, an author, who disagrees with the message of this article.  “Bookstores should be making every effort to be the place people want to buy ebooks from, and read on whatever device they have. That means value-adding to the ebooks. Deals, memberships, exclusive content, customer-tailored specials… those should be their strategies.”

Should book retailers have their own devices, aim for a more device agnostic strategy, or both?  What do you see as the pros and cons of a store owned and branded device?  What do you think? 

CAMEX 2011 continues...

For the past few days, I have been at CAMEX. Yesterday wrapped up the educational sessions -- there were some great sessions and speakers. The next few days of CAMEX will be focused more on the trade show. Among the educational sessions there were a number related to digital this year -- sending many of the same messages we are hearing in the publishing conferences. Digital is coming (if not already here) and stores must work together as a channel. More of the sessions provided stores with specific action items to think about -- with developing strategy (and some suggestions on how to do so) a core underlying theme.

In the next few weeks I will have some follow-up postings from CAMEX -- talking about certain sessions, for example. In addition, in my session this year, one of the things I did was ask participants to write down questions they had which they would like answered. Over the next few weeks, I will have several postings that respond to some of these questions from bookstores about digital, so please look forward to those. The first one will likly appear in the middle to end of the upcoming week.

To the readers of this blog, if you have questions you would like me to address, please submit them along or drop me a note and I will include those in the list for response. Thank you again for your continued attention to the CITE.