We’ve seen a string of announcements from Nokia this week as the company tries to make up for its poor financial performance over the past 12 months. We’ve seen exclusive apps and WiFi tethering announced, and now the Finnish company is releasing its own eBook reading app in Europe this week with other countries following soon.
Nokia Reading will be coming toLumia owners in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK first and is backed by publishers from Penguin to Hachette to Pearson with a large selection of English titles and a wide range of local titles for each market. Reading Sherlock Holmes or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo just got more integrated, with Nokia taking firm aim at Amazon’s Kindle software with this release. The app is more than just a simple eBook reader though and will include resizeable type and a night reading mode from the off, with audio books, and RSS news stream integration proposed as future free updates.
reading small amounts of text is perfectly fine on the 3.5″ – 4.5″ displays, but they are simply too small for any longer periods. With this app a Nokia exclusive, it implies that Nokia have some tablet aspirations. They may be waiting until the release of Windows 8 before finally announcing those ambitions, but if they believe that e-reading is a market that they could make an impact in, we can hope that they become the first major manufacturer to use a screen like those from PixelQI that can offer both high resolution colour for video playback, but also e-ink for reading and use in direct sunlight.