No one said it would be easy to disrupt Amazon

There I was at IFA 2013 last week, stumbling around the trade show babbling incoherently in English, when I found myself at the very hip, very expensive Pauly Saal restaurant in the Mitte district of Berlin.

I was summoned there to witness the unveiling of two new e-book readers by Kobo’s EMEA managing director, former Apple exec Jean-Marc Dupuis.

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Wait, did he say e-book readers? Like, the original Kindles and Nooks?

Yes, he did. And not only e-books, but also e-magazines.

Granted, many bottles of wine were consumed — I cannot say precisely by whom. Scotch was poured. Meat and fish were served, as well as a dessert that looked like it might have fallen from the ceiling during an earthquake but was absolutely delicious. (Full disclosure: I did not pick up the check. I don’t think I could even lift it.) I’m pretty sure this happened because I was in a room with 20 other witnesses.

A book by any other name

Kobo, Dupuis explained, is an anagram for “book.” (Also for “koob,” which makes no sense whatsoever.)

You have heard of Amazon, right? I asked between mouthfuls.

Yes, it had. But after being acquired by $5 billion Japanese etailer Rakuten in fall 2011, Kobo is ready to do battle with giants. The company was in Berlin to show us the Arc 10HD, a $400 10-inch Android tablet that’s also an e-book reader, and the Aura HD, a 6-inch $150 touchscreen-based black-and-white e-book reader. (Computerworld’s Barbara Krasnoff has the specs, for those of you who are into that kind of thing.)

The Kobo devices are certainly slick enough, but they’re not game changers by any stretch. They don’t read native Kindle or Nook e-books, for example, so you’d have to perform some DRM-bending gymnastics to port your existing e-library over to them. The magazine reader is well designed, but not so well designed that it will make you forget any other emagazine app you’ve ever seen — and the per-publication pricing is unlikely to be better than NextIssue’s deal (90 rags for $10 a month). Kobo’s strategy is to lean heavily on soft features, like book recommendations based around curated collections and the ability to dive deeper into the subject matter via hyperlinks, to lure “passionate readers” into the fold.

Once I got over my hangover the next day, I began pondering whether it’s really possible for Kobo’s David to slingshot its way past the Amazon Goliath — or, for that matter, whether any relatively small tech challenger could defeat such a diverse and deeply pocketed incumbent. If Barnes & Noble doesn’t belong in the ring with Amazon, what chance does Kobo have?

The case for Kobo

Still, two factors are worth keeping in mind:

1. At one point Microsoft seemed so invincible the U.S. government tried to stop it. (Turns out they just needed to get out of the way while Microsoft fumbled with its pants.) The same with IBM. AOL — er, Aol. MySpace. Heck, AltaVista. The tech world is littered with the broken husks of market leaders that stumbled and were overtaken by upstarts; they either went belly up, pivoted to other markets, or are still struggling to regain their old dominance. I can’t think of one that’s managed it yet.

2. This is not about the U.S. market. I know, over here we tend to think the world ends at the Jersey shore or the Malibu coast. That’s our myopia talking. But the United States isn’t really the world’s dominant consumer market anymore, or at least it soon won’t be. The real action is in the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China. They might have their own entrenched e-book incumbents — I don’t follow them closely enough to know. But I’m pretty sure Amazon isn’t among them.

The e-book evolution

What I do think: e-books are here to stay. The economic advantages of publishing in pixels instead of on pulp are so obvious even I understand them. Granted, there will always be printed tomes, but they will gravitate toward the AnalogSnob ^TM market, along with actual newspapers, writing implements that use ink, and Andrew Lloyd Weber. In other words, only the elite will be able to afford them or to care.

But e-book readers? I’m not so sure about them. I mean, we’ll have them, but they’ll be software, not hardware, and they’ll be in just about every dingus that has a screen. The inexorable forces of Moore’s Law have already pushed dedicated e-book devices into the commodity space. Android tablets may be next.

Ultimately, it’s the content that matters, not the delivery mechanism. In fact, at that dinner — it may have been after the third or fourth glass, I lost count — I made a grand prediction. The reason Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, I opined, was to make it easier for him to create a truly digital newspaper, one that would be delivered on a supercheap paper-thin Kindle he’ll give away free with every subscription.

You know that old Internet aphorism, “Information wants to be free”? In the future, information won’t actually be free. But the devices it comes on might be.

Is there still a market for dedicated ebook readers? Post your own op-ed below or via email: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “No one said it would be easy to disrupt Amazon,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.