Ebook Retailer Hails Kindle’s Exposure, but Sees No Signs of Success

BooksOnBoard.com, claimed by some in the ebook blogosphere, to be the best priced ebook retailer, is meeting Amazon’s new Kindle initiative head on by bringing many ebook versions of many hardcover releases down to the same $9.99. “We want our customers to have as good a price as possible at all times,” said Bob LiVolsi, president of BooksOnBoard.com, “We have a reputation for offering some of the best prices in the industry and will continue to support that. We do not guarantee price matching, but we try.”

BooksOnBoard offers 154,000 titles, about 65,000 more than Amazon’s Kindle. Unlike Amazon, BooksOnBoard also offers four standard formats instead of Amazon’s single proprietary format. The BooksOnBoard titles can be used on dozens of devices from PCs and Macs to iPAQs, Palms and Smartphones. Amazon’s can only be read on its proprietary Kindle. BooksOnBoard ebooks can also reside on multiple devices at one time so a user can have a single book purchase stored on a home PC, laptop, office PC and PDA or phone at the same time.

LiVolsi expressed both delight and concern about the Amazon announcement. While claiming the Kindle offered good national press coverage for the small ebook industry, he added, “Amazon has given the industry a black eye twice in the last 15 months. Its history does not demonstrate concern for the digital media industry or for the ebook customer.”

In August 2006, Amazon quietly deleted the bookshelves of all of its ebook customers - bookshelves it had promoted as backup for customers ebook purchases. This left tens of thousands of customers without their investment in ebooks. Then in August 2007, Amazon allowed its Mobipocket subsidiary’s servers to be shut down for ten days without warning and without explanation during or after to its customers.

When Amazon tells people to store their ebook libraries on their servers, LiVolsi said, they are relying on people to have short memories, bad judgment or an unawareness of Amazon’s ebook history. “We believe in our customers,” LiVolsi said, “They are job 1. Amazon has enough of a war chest that it thinks it can afford to blow off tens of thousands of customers and buy a whole new set with PR and advertising. We would never consider that kind of move.”

About BooksOnBoard
Established in 2005, BooksOnBoard (BoB) is based in Austin, Texas. BoB believes in offering the broadest selection of ebooks and audio books possible with the most aggressive pricing. BoB currently carries over 154,000 titles from the major publishers and small publishing houses. BoB currently offers books in Adobe PDF, Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader and Palm/eReader format. As well as a variety of student study guides for iPods that complete one of the web’s widest selection of ebooks and audio books.