Sony fires latest salvo in e-reader war
August 7, 2009
In what is fast shaping up to be a war in the e-reader marketplace, Sony has launched a sub-$300 touch-screen “Reader Touch Edition” and the $199 “Reader Pocket Edition,” which features a 5-inch display. The company is also lowering prices of ebooks. New releases and best-sellers will all be $9.99, matching Amazon’s price point for the first time.
In addition Sony is also attempting to differentiate itself by opening the ebook market place. It offers free access to the 1 million public-domain books digitized through the Google Books Project, and ebooks purchased at Sony’s store, which use the standard EPUB format, can be shared on any combination of six PCs and e-reader devices. Owners of the Sony devices can download ebooks in the library for 21 days.
It’s ironic that Sony would play open-standards champion, given its rich history of proprietary technologies (Betamax, Memory Stick, etc.), but Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Division, says the company is committed to openness as a way to hasten the move from paper to digital.
Sony’s e-readers, Amazon’s Kindle, and the forthcoming Plastic Logic device (which will partner with Barnes & Noble and be available sometime next year), all use E Ink technology. Unlike Kindle, the Sony devices, available later this month, will sell at many retail outlets, including Best Buy, Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart. Also unlike Kindle, the Sony devices aren’t wireless. Downloading content requires consumers to connect the readers to PCs.
One Forrester analyst estimates that as many as 3 million e-reader devices will have sold by the end of this year.
More details at http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/
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