by Jason Snell
A French company is building an alternative e-reader ecosystem
Speaking of e-readers, here’s an interesting profile of the small French e-reader company Vivlio by Romain Dillet at TechCrunch:
While Amazon’s Kindle is the clear leader and Rakuten’s Kobo the obvious challenger, Vivlio has been building an open European alternative to these two tech giants. And it proves that you can compete with tech giants with a team of 35 as long as you have a distinct strategy with different goals…
“The idea was to create a European coalition — well, French at first, but we’re trying to make it European now — a coalition of companies with similar interests, booksellers and retailers of cultural goods, around a French and then European solution,” Vivlio CEO David Dupré told me.
Vivlio’s got a partner for hardware and has built on the open-source Readium LCP copy protection scheme. As a fan of e-readers in general and weird e-readers in particular, it’s great to see a company other than Amazon’s Kindle and Rakuten’s Kobo trying to build a digital reading ecosystem.