Big Sony news broke while I was sleeping: according to MobileRead, Sony is opening up their Reader to work with third-party formats. Checking the official press release confirms it as next month, the Sony Reader PRS-505 will support expanded content selections. Aside from books in Sony’s format from the Sony eBook store, their Reader will work with content in both the EPUB standard as well as Adobe’s Digital Editions.
Opening up the hardware to additional formats is about the only way Sony can compete with Amazon’s Kindle from a hardware perspective. Last I checked, there were roughly five times more Amazon Kindle titles available than Sony-compatible titles, so this move should help. I’m still staying away from a dedicated eBook reader for a few reasons. I already have hundreds of titles in the eReader format, which won’t work on either the Kindle or the Sony Reader. Plus, I’m pretty happy with the eReader app on the iPhone, which should be getting an upgrade within the next week or two based on our recent chat with the Fictionwise folks.
What’s concerning to me is that the Sony PR only addresses the PRS-505, not the older PRS-500. I would hope that a firmware upgrade is in the works for the first-gen product. And I may be reading into the press release too much, but Sony says that "new Readers model PRS-505, will be able to access and accept secure and non-secure ebooks in the EPUB format". I hope that doesn’t mean "new" as in existing PRS-505 units won’t have this capability.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/07\/24\/sony-reader-gai\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_1f4fc02b7ea53f08db1e2002a120238a","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}