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an app to consolodate all ebook stores?

Mad Mac Maniac

Mad Mac Maniac

macrumors 601
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
4,808
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A little bit of here and a little bit of there.
Is this even possible?

I don't have an iPad (yet) but I know when I do I'm going to significantly try out reading on the thing. one concern I have is which ebook app to use, ibooks, kindle, barns&noble, or any of the other dozen such apps. The main differenting factor I'm thinking about is price. The same book may be $20 on the ibook store, $16 on B&N, $15, on Kindle, and free on one of those knockoff apps. I'm a frugal guy and I know I will check every single store comparing prices (at least until I want to shoot myself or I determine one store that is always cheaper) Another concern I have is if I do end up buying some books in ibooks, some in kindle, etc, it will be difficult to remember where I bought which book.

So basically I want an app that can do two things. Query all the known/popular ebook store and display a list of them comparing prices. And then show all your purchased ebooks from all the different apps. Then when you click on one it will automatically take you into that app.

Thoughts?
 
I doubt it because Apple's is closed, and it's likely that the others are too. But I don't know :)
 
I know it's a pain.

We need to get all the management from all the competing eBook stores together and lock them into a room. Telling them they can only come back out when they have agreed to work together.

It's doing no-one any favours, Authors or Customers having to have these different areas that are not compatible.

One day, one day..............
 
Piggie said:
I know it's a pain.

We need to get all the management from all the competing eBook stores together and lock them into a room. Telling them they can only come back out when they have agreed to work together.

It's doing no-one any favours, Authors or Customers having to have these different areas that are not compatible.

One day, one day..............
Click to expand...

Well I certainly don't see that happening anytime soon.... But I wouldn't imagine it being too difficult for some 3rd party to access all of the bookstores in one consolodated place. even if that's not possible now I feel like that would be the most reasonable solution to happen someday.
 
The DRM makes it all but impossible to do it. Even if someone managed to do it they could be sued under the DMCA. All the entertainment people and publishers are convinced that every single person who buys anything is a pirate who will pass out a gazillion copies. Honest people are the victims.
 
The nice thing about the iPad as an eReader is that all these reader apps are 100% free to install on your iPad. That means you really don't HAVE to choose other than the convenience of storing all books in one place.

Jeff Bezos has been quoted as saying that the Kindle's proprietary format is where they have sunk all their development efforts because they don't want to be "bogged down" by open-source ePub standards. You can bet that with the Kindle's success, they won't be moving off of that standard any time soon. I also strongly suspect that the Kindle will remain closed at the hardware level to reading ePub at ALL since that would break the close alignment between the Kindle hardware and the Amazon cloud.

Everyone else, even Apple, seems to have embraced ePub as the standard. That pretty much means you are going to have to maintain at least two reader apps on your iPad...iBooks and the Kindle app. Because I don't see Amazon licensing their AZM format to anyone else anytime soon.

We've been a multiple eReader family for some time. Older Kindle, new Kindle, iPad, Nook Classic and now a Nook Color. Its been rather nice to be able to grab the iPad (until I recently sold it) and know that no matter where I left off on one of the other devices, that app on the iPad would let me pick things back up again. I'm fairly sure that even if someone does create a "universal" eBook reader app, you'd lose some of this synch ability.
 
If you are willing to spend the time and effort removing DRM and converting your ebooks to your preferred format, you can buy books from multiple sources and read them using the ereader app of your choice. I tend to buy my books from Amazon, but usually deDRM them, conver to ePub and read them in iBooks.
 
I understand you won't be able to create a 3rd party app with access to download and read in-app.

I simply want a price comparison query. Then you can choose the least expensive option and the app could take you directly to that company's site/app to download. Thats my main wish.

Then if possible, the 3rd party app could also maintain a list of all the books that you bought and which app you bought them in. In a perfect world (but I know this wouldn't be possible at the time being) you could actually click on the book and it would take you into the app that you purchased the book from to read the book. (well in a perfect world you could read it directly out of the 3rd party app, but I'm trying to be moderately practical here...)
 
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