Microsoft Reader

~ the last words ~

by the time i would have read an ebook on a screen, it was a kindle, not a microsoft reader. i never used the app. i was 16 in 2000, online from a 33.6k ttnet modem in turkey, and the device microsoft reader was built for was a pocket pc PDA that mostly got carried around on business trips in the US. ebooks as a consumer category did not exist in turkey then. the closest thing i had to one was a scanned PDF of a textbook chapter that someone had emailed around campus a few years later.

the product launched on august 9, 2000 alongside the pocket pc 2000 platform. its big selling feature was cleartype, microsoft's subpixel font-rendering tech that made small type on early color LCDs actually readable. the file format was.lit, an extension of microsoft compiled html help with DRM bolted on top. you bought a book at the barnes-and-noble microsoft-reader storefront and read it on your laptop or your ipaq. for the first few years there was real momentum, with publishers signing on under the assumption that the company shipping windows would also win the e-reading layer.

the kindle launched in november 2007 and took the market in about two years. by 2010 the e-reading habit had moved to amazon's hardware on one side and the open.epub format on every other device. microsoft reader had no hardware story of its own beyond the pocket pc line that was already dying. microsoft announced the end in august 2011 and stopped selling.lit titles that november. the app itself was pulled for good on august 30, 2012. windows phone 7 never supported it.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

the reader pitch in 2000 was that screens were finally good enough to read on. cleartype made small text legible on the 320x240 pocket pc displays of the era. the.lit format compressed books well enough to fit a full novel onto a 16mb compact flash card. microsoft had book-publisher partnerships in place, the most visible being penguin and harpercollins, plus a side deal with audible for audio. it looked like microsoft was about to do to books what they had done to spreadsheets.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is how confidently microsoft entered the market and how thoroughly amazon erased that head start. microsoft had a seven-year lead, cleartype, the publisher relationships, every windows laptop on earth as a distribution channel. amazon had a closed device and a much better store. closed device and a much better store turned out to be the entire game. by 2009 nobody was making.lit files anymore. by 2011 microsoft did not bother shipping the app on its own new mobile platform.

~ the long tail ~

nothing carried forward in a clean line. cleartype lived on as a font-smoothing setting in windows display preferences, where it still sits as a checkbox. the.lit format calcified, with the personal-library conversion scripts going through a folklore phase among ebook hoarders in the early 2010s. amazon won the consumer side outright while the.epub format won the open-standard layer of everything that was not amazon. microsoft never tried to ship a reader again. there is a separate windows 8-era app also called microsoft reader for PDF and XPS documents, which is unrelated and also discontinued. the brand stayed dead.

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