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Nintendo 3DS eBookstore Now Live

Nintendo hashonto nintendo 3ds been promising to launch an ebookstore for the Nintendo 3DS for over a year now and it has finally arrived – in Japan.

It’s called honto for Nintendo 3DS, and the service includes both a reading app as well as an ebookstore. The current selection is limited to only around 200 titles, but Nintendo hopes to increase their catalog to over 1,000 in 2014.

I don’t have full details on honto, but my source did note that ebooks were selling for between 100 yen and 1,000 yen ($0.96 and $9.60 USD). The ebooks support a TOC and an adjustable font size. The ebookstore is focused on kids and contains picture books, biographies, history books, and novels, all of which I am told are organized based on age and Kanji reading level.

And if my second source is to be believed the ebooks look something like this.

ereader-honto[1]

That photo is reportedly from the official unveiling at the Tokyo Book Fair in July.

Nintendo has been dabbling in ebooks for several years now, and in fact honto for Nintendo 3DS is Nintendo’s second attempt at opening an ebookstore on this handheld gaming device. The first was to have launched last year under the name eBookstore Anywhere, but that deal appears to have fallen through some time in early 2013.

And before that earlier ebookstore Nintendo also licensed ebook cartridges for the Nintendo DS, the predecessor to the 3DS.  Nintendo released collections of public domain titles in the US and UK markets in 2009, and Harlequin released at least one ebook cartridge in Japan in 2010.

Have you read on one of Nintendo handheld gaming devices? I know that there have been any number of 3rd-party apps which brought at least a basic ebook reading ability, but I’ve never used one myself. If you have, how well did it function?

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Comments


LCNR December 19, 2013 um 6:02 pm

Hi!

I haven’t, but it’s funny that you should post an article about the Nintendo 3DS today because no later than yesterday evening I was at the Louvre and much to my surprise I discovered that the Nintendo 3DS is now the museum’s official audio guide. I mention it because in addition to the audio track it makes use of the dual screen to display (interactive) text and pictures (there are apparently relays all over the museum to locate the device and trigger events).

LCNR

Nate Hoffelder December 19, 2013 um 8:09 pm

Now that’s interesting. I wonder why they went with a 3DS instead of a tablet or a PDA sized handheld?


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