Vivlio
Romain Dillet (via Jason Snell):
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.
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From the very beginning, Vivlio bet that the book industry would remain fragmented — building yet-another-Amazon wouldn’t be a winning move. Vivlio signed a handful of partnerships with small and big chain bookstores so that it could run their e-book stores for them.
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Vivlio contributed to Readium LCP, an open-source DRM solution that doesn’t require an Adobe account (or any third-party account). Many companies and public institutions have embraced LCP in recent years. Adobe’s DRM is still the leading protection system, but this technical move contributes to the open ecosystem philosophy behind Vivlio.
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Vivlio partners with PocketBook for its e-book readers. But these devices aren’t just rebranded PocketBook devices, as the company adds a software layer so that they work with the entire Vivlio ecosystem. For instance, you can log in to your bookstore account directly on your Vivlio e-reader. All your purchases are automatically synchronized with your device and Vivlio’s cloud storage.
