Sony, in another swipe at Kindle, moves to open e-book standard |
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Sony, in another swipe at Kindle, moves to open e-book standard
Sony has been pulling out all the stops lately as it tries to make its electronic readers more competitive with Amazon's Kindle. First Sony tapped Google's massive book-scanning project to boost its list of titles, then it announced it's coming out with a $199 reader -- a hundred dollars less than the cheapest Kindle. Now Sony is making plans to embrace the open ePub format for digital books -- setting itself apart from Amazon, which restricts e-books to its own Kindle device and iPhone application.
More from the New York Times:
After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year.
“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”
While he didn't mention Amazon by name, the reference seems pretty clear there.
Amazon stirred up a lot of fears about its control of e-book content recently when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" from Kindles. Amazon said they were unauthorized editions, and credited people's accounts, but the move sparked some bad press and prompted an apology from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (as well as a lawsuit from a high school student who said his notes were lost along with a deleted copy of "1984").
Will Sony's move toward ePub give it a leg up? It's hard to tell at this point -- it depends if the other readers coming onto the market make a dent in Kindle's dominant position.
It should be noted too that while Sony's ePub books will now be readable on other devices (with the exception of Kindle), Sony will put Adobe anti-copy software on its e-books.
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