Microsoft Building an 'Xbox Reading' App For Windows 8

Nate the greatest writes "Microsoft has already sunk $600 million into Nook Media, the ebook division spun off from Barnes & Noble in 2012, but I guess that's not enough for the Redmond tech giant: news broke today that they have a third ebook effort in the works. A new job listing discovered by the Chinese tech blog LiveSino has revealed that Microsoft is hiring an ebook developer to work on 'a groundbreaking interactive reading app on Windows, which incorporates books, magazines, and comics.' The position was posted by the Xbox Music, Video, and Reading unit, which had already released two apps for Windows 8 (video, music) and is clearly going for a trifecta. This new app shows all the signs of being completely unrelated to the Office Reader app, which leaked last year. That app reportedly focused more on PDFs, textbooks, and office docs, while the 'Xbox Reading' app mentions magazines and digital comics."

Comments

Patent lawsuit

[bernywork]

Let's get one thing straight here, the only reason why Microsoft dropped $300m into the Nook business was to bury a antitrust suit by Barnes and Noble over the patents they were allegedly infringing by using Android. Fearing failure and their Android licensing business drying up, they decided to make the whole lot go away.

http://blogs.reuters.com/aliso...

The direction to Nook should have taken.

[taxman_10m]

The eInk Nook was able to be rooted into a full fledged android tablet. The version of android was rather old which was unfortunate, but otherwise it was a nice device. Reading GMail, looking at RSS feeds, viewing twitter were all pretty good on an eInk screen. It would have been nice to see a company produce a device that did this.

Re: Shutup about the beta already!

[Billly Gates]

You know what I did?

I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked "Slashdot Classic Problem solved. I stayed logged in and slashdot has my preference for classic memorized. Did that on my phone.

Now all is good except I get spam on every damn news story going BETA OMG EWWW and I am tired of reading about it or having 1/2 of the comments talking about it. Jeesh

Ironic

[JohnNemesh]

Since anyone who can read is not the target audience for either the Xbox or Windows 8!

And they have been here before...

[R_Harrold]

Anyone remember the Microsoft Reader application? They abandoned the application and all of the folks who purchased DRM protected material for it when they came out with the Windows Phone. Let's hope that they don't make the same mistakes again.

Re:And they have been here before...

[snakeplissken]

Let's hope that they don't make the same mistakes again.

who, microsoft, or the abandoned purchasers?

Re:Who cares

[timeOday]

And who in their right mind wants Windows on their phone?

Since this is a reader application, I would say the same about reading on a phone. It can be done, but it's not a good fit.

On a convertible laptop/tablet (Surface Pro), on the other hand, making Windows 8 flexible enough to handle both settings well actually makes sense. Especially for a reader - you might be using it as a tablet (sitting on the couch reading), or you might be referring to a textbook while doing homework using the keyboard.

So, yeah, "windows everywhere" was an overreach. But "windows for both touch and pointer/keyboard-driven interfaces", on the other hand, is a worthwhile goal.

Competing Against Amazon

[Jason Levine]

I know that Microsoft still likes to think of itself as the 800lb gorilla that can just walk into any area it chooses and dominate, but in the eBook market, Microsoft is a mouse and Amazon is the 800lb gorilla. For better or worse, Amazon essentially *is* the eBook market. (Source - Amazon has 67% of the market. Next is Barnes & Noble with 11.8% and Apple with 8.2%.)

If Microsoft is going to win over eBook readers, they are going to need to offer something substantial to woo market share away from Amazon. I honestly don't see that happening and it's not like they can use Windows 8 as leverage the way they used to leverage Windows to prop up IE against other browsers. They'll probably launch this, it will languish in the market for a few years, and then it will be killed off.