Amazon.com's Kindle often gets credit for spurring the electronic book market, but it's sometimes overlooked that Sony had an e-reader on the market a full year before the first Kindle launched. Today I chatted with Steve Haber, the president of Sony's digital reading division, who spent the day in Seattle — Amazon turf — to talk up his company's new lineup of reading devices (the $199 Reader Pocket Edition, $299 Reader Touch Edition, and soon-to-be-released $399 Reader Daily Edition). Haber talked about the explosion of digital reading devices and Sony's holiday sales strategy. He even shared some thoughts on Kindle, though he somehow managed not to utter the name of Amazon's device during our hour-long interview. Read on for excerpts.

On the growth of electronic books:

"This whole thing is building up so much momentum. There's a lot of focus on it, which is wonderful, and sales are phenomenal. It's just beginning. The publishing industry is huge, much larger than the music industry. As it turns digital, everyone is jumping in."

On the importance of selling digital readers in brick-and-mortar stores:

"It's extremely important. We found that what people really like is to touch, use it, understand it ... you go into stores and talk to consumers and they say, 'You can do that? You can do that?' It doesn't mean everyone is going to buy that way, but it's really nice to be able to see what you can buy.

On retailers that are carrying Sony Readers this holiday season:

"Wal-mart, Best Buy, Target, Staples, Borders. Last season was about 3,500 outlets. This year it's 9,000. Best Buy, this is the first time they have it in stores. It was just online last year. This is a signficant push for them. Wal-mart will be more stores than last year. And Staples is all new. Toys R Us.

On Amazon's Kindle:

"Competition is good in the marketplace ... It helps potential customers go, 'Oh, there's something really here. It's not a one-off gadget. There's a lot more to this. I want to check it out.'

On Sony's embrace of ePub, the open format for reading digital books across multiple devices (which Amazon has not adopted):

"My analogy is if you walk into a mall and you're with a bunch of your friends to go shopping and you can only go in one store and they can go into many stores. It probably makes more sense to shop many stores. That's our thinking ... It frankly makes it more fun for us because we can work with so many different companies. We're not here trying to put a wall up to block our customers. We don't get emails complaining about 'Why did you lock me in?'

On Sony's $9.99 pricing on new release and best-selling digital books (a price point originally set by Amazon):

"Eventually we moved our pricing there. It was the market reality that we needed to be competitive on the pricing ... It's not profitable, quite frankly, at that price, but consumers don't know what our profit margins are. They know what the pricing is."

On whether Sony will makes its digital content available on other devices, including smartphones:

"Absolutely. We have the library for PC and Mac, and clearly we are developing a growing number of applications. We see it as very important for the customer experience.

Other tidbits from the interview:

Sony's Reader Daily Edition — the largest Sony reader with a 7.1-inch screen — will be available for preorder starting Nov. 18, and Sony will announce newspaper and magazine content partners for the device in December. The Daily Edition will have 3G wireless downloads via AT&T, but in the U.S. only.

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