This week, the U.S. Patent office finally granted Amazon's ebook reader patent from 2006. While this might not in itself seem like news, what is surprising is that the patent granted is far more over-reaching than everyone had assumed. They also seem to have enough legal basis to sue the Barnes & Nobles Nook if they wanted to.
You can read a very detailed and encompassing analysis of the patent via Crunchgear.
What interested me here is that Amazon's patent covers the LCD being touch-sensitive as well. This pretty much hits most of their competition. So far, the war between the ebook readers has remained a price war. Will it turn into legal battles? What do you think?
I think ebook readers are way to expensive for me to even think about buying them right now. Kindle does have a program you can download to your computer though and several free books that I've been enjoying a lot lately :)
ReplyDeleteIt's now a few months on, and I haven't heard of Kindle going after the competition yet. I think they would be stupid to do so. There are a lot of people who are loyal to their non-Kindle e-readers. Squashing the competition now would just make people with those other e-readers angry... and would probably cause a backlash that would hurt Amazon's sales.
ReplyDelete@la coccinelle - I like the backlash idea, it really would peeve the world!
ReplyDeleteI don't even LIKE the kindle
ReplyDelete