Summary

growth of Smartphone and media tablets purchases. 4 If someone wants to read a book on the go, he
can purchase a tablet that has a color display with full media functions. If he is on a tighter budget,
he could purchase a pure eBook reader like Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader at
a lower price. These eBook readers are usually thinner and can only display in electronic black ink to
compete with the media tablets on cost and portability. However as technology gets better and prices
fall, white box media tablets are also closing in on the eBook reader pricing, causing a further drop
of eBook reader prices. Alternatively, if prices can’t be lowered, multimedia functions and a color
display had to be added like the introduction of Kindle Fire to compete in the media tablet market.
2.3.2. Software Development for Distributing Digital Comics
There are two kinds of software in this analysis: the developer’s store and the agent. A
developer’s store can be Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon’s Kindle store, or Kobo’s Kobo Store, where
users could browse and download content like eBooks, music, movies or games. These stores are
developed by the hardware maker to lock in their users to their system by providing convenience,
but making it difficult for the users to migrate to another device. Availability of ratings, reviews and
ease of purchase has become the standard features of these stores.
The other kind of software is the agent software, which is an online service or app that acts
like an agent to help content creators get their work into the store. These agents become useful when
the device’s own store restricts where the content can be sold, so the authors and artists have to go
through an agent to sell their content to a bigger market or specific countries. Agents are also useful
when the procedures to convert a file to its proprietary format are too complicated for the content
owner. Examples of such agents include lulu.com and Amazon’s very own agent software “Kindle
Direct Publishing”(KDP) that will be analyzed in a later chapter.
4 Columbus, Louis. "2013 Roundup of Smartphone and Tablet Forecasts & Market Estimates."
Forbes. N.p., 17 Jan. 2013. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.
8