On Friday, three of Germany's biggest booksellers, along with its biggest media company and its biggest telecom company, debuted an e-book distribution platform and an e-reader intended to compete with Amazon, Apple, and other e-reader hardware and content providers like Kobo. The various parties involved are: the bookstore chains Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel (not a German doughnut, despite the way the name sounds), Deutsche Telekom, and a little operation called Bertelsmann. The platform site, at www.tolino.de, launched with 300,000 titles, which is more than double the number of e-books available in German through Amazon.de's Kindle store. Users of the site are given the option to buy books from any of the participating booksellers, so that it functions more as a portal to the individual sites than as a new one-stop-shopping source.
