Strangely, it wasn’t him talking about games that grabbed my interest. It was hearing that Nintendo is planning to launch a digital e-reader type service where you can download books, magazines, newspapers, comics, and other publications to your Wii U console. These publications would stream to your Wii U controller’s touchscreen, and you could go lay in your bed or couch and read them. The touch screen would be used to flip through pages of an e-book or magazine, and there would even be a searchable index.
My source also told me that people with a 3DS will share the Wii U’s e-reader service, and it will be able to download books, magazines, newspapers, and comic books too. You can zoom in and out of text and graphics. Nintendo wants Wii U and 3DS to share certain services the same way Iphone/Ipad share services.
Nintendo has also talked about possibly making electronic versions of their official strategy guides which were called “Players Guides” available for download for virtual console games. Most of these official player guides are no longer in print, and the games are old, which is why Nintendo is thinking of making these official player guides available for free to gamers. While you play a game like Super Mario World on your television, you could flip through a free official Nintendo players guide on the Wii U controller’s touchscreen. Nintendo might also let Prima games, who is their official partner for strategy guides, make strategy guides available for modern or future released games. But the Prima official strategy guides will cost money unlike the Nintendo official strategy guides.
Also, Nintendo is looking into having electronic instruction booklets made available for virtual console games that you download. These would be electronic versions of the instruction booklets that would be packaged into older SNES or N64 games, and you could flip through them on your Wii U controller.
Nintendo is actively seeking publishers to bring electronic versions of popular magazines to the Wii U in the future. A wide variety of these magazines are related to sports, politics, technology, entertainment, celebrities, music, cooking, and fashion. If you already have a subscription to a specific magazine, the Wii U has the ability to automatically download the latest issue as soon as it’s available even if the system is turned off and you’re asleep.
After hearing about this, it made me wonder if we could ever see Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, or Maxim on the Wii U controller’s touchscreen.
Another interesting part of this story is that Nintendo is interested in making every single issue of Nintendo Power (from 1988 to currently) available for download to be read on the Wii U’s touchscreen controller. Nintendo Power has a pretty large archive of issues that would give gamers a huge nostalgia trip. I have not heard how Nintendo plans to price books, magazines, or newspapers.
The common thing I’m hearing from those in the industry is that the Wii U will be more focused on services. Nintendo wants Wii U to be used by everyone in the family, and that means creating useful services for non gamers. I think it will be interesting to see how companies such as Amazon and Apple will respond to Nintendo trying to take a bite out of the e-book market.
