Barnes & Noble's Nook freed from Windows, WinPhone apps pledge Barnes & Noble's struggling Nook e-book division can breathe a little easier, now that Microsoft has let the bookseller off the hook on its promise to offer e-reader apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Redmond pumped $300m into Nook back in 2012, in a deal that gave it a 17.5 per cent stake in B&N's underperforming e-book …
Microsoft ran a free book promotion for a while and I built up a collection of e-books for MS Reader. I can't say I liked the reader software though. I only used the desktop version and it was so basic as to be frustrating. Someone released a tool called clit which de-DRM'd the books and I found it easier to decompress them and read them in a web browser.
MS Reader was a pioneering effort but it was released years ahead of suitable hardware. By the time some good device were appearing Microsoft had lost interest and failed to form the right partnerships to push the LIT format.
If Microsoft really wanted to have a serious influence on ebooks, they should make EPUB a native format for Word. Atlantis Word Processor does this and is worth the $35 for that reason if you have the need but Atlantis has some serious deficiencies of which the lack of tables is the most crippling for many kinds of projects.
If Barnes & Noble had been smarter about the problems on the development side, they would have pumped some money into Sigil, which is a great tool for formatting EPUB files but needs a lot of man hours put into it to make it a really professional tool.
"MS Reader was a pioneering effort but it was released years ahead of suitable hardware. By the time some good device were appearing Microsoft had lost interest and failed to form the right partnerships to push the LIT format."
Pioneering? Hardly. fbreader was around a good bit before MS Reader and could also be used as an offline web-reader..
I remember it well on my Nokia 770 tablet.
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