I think there are two major roadblocks to adoption of any (not just FOSS) third-party ebook reader in this day and age: one is how to acquire ebooks legally and the other is how to get these books onto the device afterwards. While imperfect, the Kindle does integrate with a user’s Amazon account and provide a fairly simple mechanism for an individual to sync their purchased ebooks with their physical device. For most other devices, you’re probably going to have to actually attach the device to a PC and copy files to internal storage or pop out the SD card and use that. For your moderately competent user, that’s great, but to some extent we’re living in a progressively more and more tech illiterate society where both younger and older Americans have never had to do something like this. I think a good business idea for someone would be to create a non-Amazon ebook store with a focus on creating clients for different ebook readers, assuming those readers supported third party apps, that would provide a similarly easy mechanism of purchasing and downloading ebooks.
I think there are two major roadblocks to adoption of any (not just FOSS) third-party ebook reader in this day and age: one is how to acquire ebooks legally and the other is how to get these books onto the device afterwards. While imperfect, the Kindle does integrate with a user’s Amazon account and provide a fairly simple mechanism for an individual to sync their purchased ebooks with their physical device. For most other devices, you’re probably going to have to actually attach the device to a PC and copy files to internal storage or pop out the SD card and use that. For your moderately competent user, that’s great, but to some extent we’re living in a progressively more and more tech illiterate society where both younger and older Americans have never had to do something like this. I think a good business idea for someone would be to create a non-Amazon ebook store with a focus on creating clients for different ebook readers, assuming those readers supported third party apps, that would provide a similarly easy mechanism of purchasing and downloading ebooks.