When you are coming from behind, embracing openness is always a good strategy. That is exactly what Sony is doing with its electronic book reader, which is up against the Amazon Kindle. The key to the Kindle’s success is that it is paired with the largest book store in the world, where most people likely to buy an electronic book already have accounts.
Sony is trying to fight this advantage by being more open and thereby attracting other large players into its sphere of influence. Its biggest ally in this fight is Google, whose M.O. is to attack closed industries with open technologies. Today, Google is making available more than one million public domain books in the open ePub format, which also happens to be the linchpin of Sony’s open strategy.
Yesterday, at the unveiling of Sony’s latest electronic book reader at the New York Public Library, the head of its ebook division, Steve Haber, emphasized: “”You want a ubiquitous experience: open, open open.” He repeated the mantra in the way that Steve Ballmer says, “Developers, developers, developers,” except he said it a little softer since he was in a library.
As I’ve mentioned, the key to its open strategy is Sony’s commitment to adopt the ePub format, which is an open format for electronic books. As a result of embracing that format, Sony announced yesterday that libraries, starting with the New York Public Library, would be able to “loan” out digital editions of books in their collection for 21 days to people with Sony Readers. Furthermore, book chains could start selling their own digital books without going through Sony’s digital bookstore as long as the books are in the ePub format.
With an open digital book format like ePub, anyone can sell or distribute electronic books. It doesn’t have to be Sony, which after all is more interested in selling Readers than in selling the books. Amazon’s strategy is the opposite. It wants to sell as many electronic books as possible in case people transition away from paper books. The Amazon Kindle does not support ePub. The Kindle is tied to Amazon’s book store. Its sole purpose is to drive sales of ebooks on Amazon. If you could buy an ebook at Barnes and Noble and read it on the Kindle, that would not make Jeff Bezos happy.
As long as Amazon remains the market leader in electronic books, it can stick to its closed format much like Apple did with the iPod and its DRM-wrapped AAC music format for many years. Eventually, though, open won and Apple removed the DRM from songs in iTunes as well. The same will happen with the Kindle and Amazon, but not until Amazon feels that it has a safe enough lead so that Sony, Google, and all the booksellers in the world combined won’t ever be able to catch up.
Meanwhile, Amazon has joined another open crusade—this one against Google. It is a member of the Openbookalliance, which is a group of publishers, Microsoft, and others who oppose Google’s book settlement. It’s funny how companies choose to be open only when it suits them.
All info should be free.
all info should be expensive
Then who pays for it’s creation? To feed the creators?
I often wonder at the tech industry’s love for Google and their “open” initiatives. Sure, we love all this so-called free information, but make no mistake, Google is getting paid. It’s the authors, artists and creators who ultimately are eating the most of the cost of all this free content.
The Internet was supposed to provide for direct distribution from the creative source. Music, news, movies, games could all forgo those pesky distributors who charged such a premium. Yet interestingly, most of the money now is being made by the new generation of distributors: news and content aggregators. Not what many of us were thinking back in ‘98-99.
Yeah, must suck for Herman Melville. I bet he hasn’t seen a single royalty check from this!
Spot on, Allison.
Well perhaps it’s time for a rethink around copyright in this digital age where the cost of reproduction is zero. Maybe a patronage model may make more sense. As it is the vast majority of writers never get paid a dime anyway. Only those few that get “published” and make enough sales…
We need to be innovative in coming up with models to encourage writing (if we believe it to be social good). 50yr copyrights may have made sense once, but I’m not sure they do now.
The open books concept fires out well. The competition is good and its going to yield definite benefit. But Sony and Google are startups in this as compared to Amazon Kindle.
they make money off of advertising, so stop tryna turn shit into a conspiracy theory. damn bitchbloggers i tellya!
Spelling correction – “teh”. Last paragraph “… teh AAC …”
Otherwise, great article.
Isaac
He was obviously trying to make the article sound, “cool” and “1337″.
Teh is just a cooler way of spelling the. Get with the times.
teh =the, fro = for, form= from – haunt me!
By this time next year, there will be dozens of ebook readers on the market, many of them with 3G and WiFi support.
At this point, using a common standard will be of benefit to all–but Amazon. Given the pride issue, I wonder how long it will be before Amazon concedes to being “Betamaxed” by none other than Sony? And what happens at that point? Does Amazon abruptly drop the Kindle, and open up their bookstore to their competitors? Plug on with .azw/Kindle, with a gentle transition to ePub (dooming the Kindle in the process)? Do nothing?
It looks like OverDrive, Sony’s library distribution partner, also serves as an intermediary for colleges.
If Sony extends their e-reader’s capability to academic libraries (and why wouldn’t they), the Kindle DX’s scholastic aspirations are, what’s the word I’m looking for, um, toast….
http://www.over...m/products/cdl/
http://www.overdrive.com/
Nice! I don’t even have a Kindle yet, but I really like which way this is going!
This is interesting. And well timed for me – so thank you.
I want an ebook reader, but don’t know which way to jump yet. As with Betamax and VHS, there will be a winner and a loser here. This article helps me because it means I’m going to sit tight for a while longer and carry on reading PDF’s on my old Dell Axim 30!
Watching the space…
As far as I can remember iTunes *always* supported mp3 files, you just couldn’t buy them from the store.
Umm, Apple does sell any MP3 files. They simply have removed DRM from their AAC files. AAC isn’t a proprietary Apple format. And MP3 isn’t an open format.
http://en.wikip...ed_Audio_Coding
http://en.wikip...ia.org/wiki/Mp3
Seems like a “not” is missing. I am assuming Eric meant “Umm, Apple does not sell any MP3 files. “
yes,you are right. It was the DRM combined with AAC that was the problem. I tried to clear that up.
actually Apple doesn’t sell MP3, iTunes did get rid of the FairPlay DRM wrapper (for music) but it’s still AAC.
I don’t think consumers were fighting against AAC. Consumers were fighting against DRM.
Similarly, I doubt anyone is against ePub. The new (and lowered) war cry is “open standards” and not “free software” or “open-source software” anymore. It seems that we have discovered that open standards is a more preplexing issue than free software.
As long as an ePub file is DRM-free, I am OK with ePub files. I could talk forever about the ills of DRM but I will just put the first link I found on Google
http://www.lear...op_10_argu.html
oh, but Sony does wrap its ePub books with DRM (from Adobe). that is how the 21-day library loans work
This is a no-brainer. Electronic books at $9.99 vs free? Where is the argument here? The Kindle is too expensive. The Amazon electronic books are too expensive. End of story. If this changes, then we have a new ball game.
Actually you could rent books from the New York Public Library for your Sony E Reader for some time using the Epub format, I don’t know what is new there. For New Yorker, the suscription to the Library is free and renting book is free. I think it costs 100$ a year for people living outside of New York and renting book is free.
They have a limited number of e copy for each book (same as in a Library) and you can put an option for the book so that you are warned when it becomes free.
Main reason why I chose the Sony e reader over the Kindle in the first place and I am more than happy of Sony’ attitude on the ebook business.
Amazon already has a start this way with their acquisition of Lexcycle recently. If they want to compete they need to add this into their existing Kindle app…although that will probably be the end of Stanza.
Interesting to see Sony coming in from behind. They have usually been know as the market leaders and the company to catch up to. I think their open concept will prove to be a huge benefit.
This is interesting.
One big diff between the Kindle and the new Sony Wireless Reader is, as I understand it, you can’t use the Sony reader to browse the web in general, you can just go to the Sony bookstore. If I have that wrong, please let me know.
I wonder if Plastic Logic, a pretty cool eBook discovered at DEMOFall 08, has got partners and where they stand now
@Guillaume
As i understand it, you are right. But using the Kindle for browsing the web is supposed to be painful, at best, and keeping the wireless on drains the battery pretty fast. So, the Kindlers tend to keep that off other than for quick downloading book. On, then off again.
Looks like Google is going to dominate every other market in the business arena. Its expansion seems very promising..
FREE PRICING AND INFORMATION GOODS
There is often a debate about free software, free information etc. Many argue that information products should NOT be free because the creators have to be compensated. I agree – the creators should be paid. The problem is that for a long time the distribution of information products (such as music labels that distributed CDs etc. to the market) was controlled by intermediaries such as book publishers, music labels etc. The internet has reduced the cost of distribution of information products, and enabled the creators to bypass the middlemen/intermediaries. Therefore, creators can charge less for their products. Now creators can distribute some products for free (e.g., no-frills versions of software upto a certain number of users) and charge for other versions.
The argument that all information products should be free is ridiculous. The internet has enabled producers/creators to lower prices, “sell” some for free and charge less for others.
It’s amusing how the library is re-intermediating itself in the process of distributing books. Digital distribution makes the mundane process of physically storing and distributing books redundant. It’s value then can be about curation and, through its arrangement with publishers, free public access. But limiting number of digital copies is a completely artificial constraint. Outside of academia most people use libraries to borrow books for free. anyone who can make a commercial arrangement with a distributor could potentially create a library.
Question: I remember quite a while ago (when the internet was new (not really)) that when you publish to the internet, there is a (flimsy) copyright attributed to you. And that, you, as the publisher to the web, is now the copyright holder.
If this is still true, is this a play by Sony / Google to take ‘public domain’ books and ’steal’ the copyrights?
current ebooks are useless. You can’t lend, give or sell the books you buy.
Sony had shown little energy in marketing their reader until recently. As an owner of a PRS 505, I’ve received a couple of surveys asking about my use, and offering an extensive set of new features upon which I was asked to comment. From this list of features, it was clear that Sony understood the scope of the problem of ebooks/readers.
With the Plastic Logic device due out in 2010, Sony needed to “up its game”. The partnering with Google is an excellent stroke, although all of these books are out-of-copyright, and might not be of interest to many people. Anyone doing research, or just interested in investigating the body of literature that has grown dusty on the shelves of our great libraries, will be able to read to their “heart’s delight”—for free.
Sony also has reduced the cost of their for-fee ebooks, which is sweet.
But there is still a lot of work to do. A Wifi/Blutooth interface, better .PDF support, and better library management support is needed, as well as more ruggedizing of the units is needed.
Partnering with Overdrive is interesting, but might not prove to be very useful, since most libraries don’t actually pay for very any “copies” of each book. This could change with demand, however.
All, in all, a great step forward.
When are we going to be able to get books in PDF? It’s the perfect format for these things–publishers already use it to send books to press. Why can’t we keep using it on digital readers?!?!