Common E-Book Format Adopted By Sony

[engine]

Common E-Book Format Adopted By Sony [nytimes.com]

For many people, the problem with electronic books is that they come loaded with just those kinds of restrictions. Digital books bought today from Amazon.com, for example, can be read only on Amazon’s Kindle device or its iPhone software.

Some restrictions on the use of e-books are likely to remain a fact of life. But some publishers and consumer electronics makers are aiming to give e-book buyers more flexibility by rallying around a single technology standard for the books. That would also help them counter Amazon, which has taken an early lead in the nascent market.

On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.

There has to be something in this. Hardware and software incompatibilities only make it less adoptable to the average person.

[jecasc]

Great - but not of much use for me. The Sony PRS-500 came out in September 2006 and only about two years later they anounced that there wouldn't be any firmware updates anymore. So no ePub for me. Which means I can't buy any more new books for my Sony Reader but am stuck with what is available free on the internet on websites like feedbooks.com or gutenberg.org.

If I have to buy a new ebook Reader every two years although the old one still works perfectly fine, ebooks are a little to expensive for my taste.

[tangor]

I like the CONCEPT of ebook readers, but I detest the architecture/built in obsolescence that makes them so expensive. These days I quit. I have a few hundred books to read so will go through those first before I take a look an the "next gen" of readers... when they finally appear.