When I first read the news that Nintendo was moving to turn their hand-held DS game system into an ebook reader, I was pretty excited–Imagine, turning a wildly popular game platform into a Kindle competitor! Sadly, it’s not as cool as it could be. It looks like Nintendo is releasing a single collection of 100 classic titles (the anthology sports the imaginative title “100 classic books“) for the DS. It looks to me like the titles being mentioned are probably all in the public domain, which means no messy royalty issues for Nintendo. It also means that the titles are unlikely to be terribly compelling to young readers. I dug up some demographics information on the DS, and it looks like 54% of DS owners in Europe (not sure as of when–pre-June 2006, when the linked article was written) are women, which bodes well for their venture into ebooks, as most readers are women. However, 52% of European DS users are under 14, which seems like a young market for “100 classic books.”
It would be nice to see Nintendo decide to enable the DS to use its built-in wi-fi to go online and buy ebooks like the Kindle, or even better to be able to access sites like Project Gutenberg and download books for free. The ability to load ePub documents onto the DS would be great too. I mean, by the end of the first quarter of 2007, there were 38 million DSs scattered across the world–that’s a pretty huge market to tap into. By comparison, the Kindle looks pretty small-time.
Reading on a DS seems like it makes a lot of sense, in the same way that reading on a cell phone does. This is a device that you tend to have with you a lot (I have a few friends with DSs, and it’s not often they don’t have them at hand). It’s also a multi-purpose device, which makes you feel better about lugging it along. It’s versatile–you can play Guitar Hero until you’re bored, and then flip through some Dickens for a while. Ubiquitous book content is nothing but a good thing for books–it exposes more people to reading, and each new person makes the book community that much richer.
Still, Nintendo’s offering, as short of the mark as it could be, is a step in the right direction. It could well be that they’re simply testing the waters with this, and are considering a more serious move into ebook territory. We’ll have to wait and see.
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