Do You Read Me?
By Dale Dougherty
Most people who've bought books online have bought them from Amazon. This aggravates traditional booksellers like Barnes & Noble who, even once they built a me-too Web site, lost the first-mover advantage in cyberspace. Now Barnes and Noble CEO Stephen Riggio is betting that by moving early into e-books and working closely with Microsoft, B&N can outsmart Amazon.
I wrote about e-books and the standards behind them in my April column, "Opening an E-book." In August, B&N opened the first e-bookstore to support the Microsoft Reader software for the PC and PocketPC. I went shopping for an e-book at Barnes and Noble, which has reduced its long, awkward domain name (barnesandnoble.com) to bn.com.
The first order of business was to download and install the Microsoft Reader. Afterward, the instructions told me I needed to "activate" the reader to access premium content. This required creating a Microsoft Passport account. Nowhere do the instructions provide an explanation as to why I need a Microsoft Passport account, but I went along, spending several dissatisfying minutes filling out forms on passport.com. When asked to set up an
e-wallet, I decided against it because I really didn't have much information about passport.com and I wasn't comfortable storing my credit card information online with Microsoft.
I tried out the Microsoft Reader, browsing through pages in its Guidebook. These pages differed from Web pages in that the fonts were more legible (Clear Type technology) and the pages had no blinking top-and-bottom ads and no navigation bars. The Reader environment is wonderfully minimalist; the
words on the page do all the talking.
