Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray
The budding market for electronic reading devices is about to get two powerful new entrants: Best Buy and Verizon. — On Wednesday, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe's best-known e-readers …
Context & Ripple Effects
The e-reader market of early-to-mid 2009 has been building toward exactly this moment: Hearst announced plans for a wireless e-reader in February, and by May the New York Times itself was examining whether big-screen e-readers could help rescue the daily press. What the category lacked was mainstream retail distribution — until now.
iRex Technologies, a Royal Philips Electronics spinoff whose reader is already one of Europe's best-known, becomes the wedge: Best Buy puts it on physical store shelves while Verizon supplies the wireless pipe. For the first time, the device battle moves out of online storefronts and into the places ordinary shoppers buy electronics.
First-order effects
- iRex gets what Amazon's Kindle never had at launch — big-box shelf presence at Best Buy plus carrier-backed connectivity through Verizon, instantly widening the funnel of shoppers who encounter an e-reader in person.
- Best Buy and Verizon convert themselves from passive sellers of other companies' gadgets into gatekeepers deciding which reading platform reaches mainstream American households.
Second-order effects
- Amazon now faces competitors distributed through channels it does not control, forcing it to think about retail placement rather than relying on its own site — and pressuring every player to lock up content partnerships to justify shelf space.
- Newspaper publishers eyeing large-format readers gain multiple potential distribution partners instead of a single device ecosystem, strengthening their bargaining position over terms.
Third-order effects
- If retailer-and-carrier distribution proves decisive, the e-book market fragments into competing device-plus-content ecosystems, with whoever owns the customer relationship at the point of sale gaining leverage over publishers.
- The pattern generalizes: connected reading devices join phones as products where carrier networks and retail floorspace — not just hardware quality — determine winners.
The trend: E-readers are following the path of phones before them, with retailers and wireless carriers emerging as the distribution chokepoints that decide which reading platforms go mainstream.