This week Sony rolled back the years and came out fighting, using its power as an established consumer electronics manufacturer to undercut the new Amazon Kindle, with a product every bit as good and with far more future internationally appeal.
The new Sony device comes with a cellular connections from AT&T Mobilit, as step which is likely to signal the real start of the electronic book wars.
Amazon’s Kindle has been the sole book reading device in the US which can be topped up over a cellular network (Sprint’s), and one of the best examples of a dumb machine to machine cellular application. Kindle can find a book in its online store, download it and charge for it, from almost anywhere in the US, using Sprint’s cellular network. Now so can the latest Sony device.
But after two generations of Kindle devices we now know that this is the cheapest way of buying and storing books, and the fastest way of getting them delivered – over a cellular network. The cost of delivery adds just few cents to the cost of each book or newspaper. Now this has been proven there is a queue to take advantage of that fact, and to usurp Amazon’s position as market leader.
Already Barnes & Noble has already entered the fray, acquiring digital book retailer Fictionwise and teaming up with US ebook reader manufacturer Plastic Logic. Plastic Logic has also said that it would work with AT&T to deliver books over a cellular network, though no device prices are known at this point. But that effectively puts the Barnes and Noble product line onto cellular and directly up against Kindle already.
Amazon has also pitched a Kindle newspaper deal at US newspapers subscribers, bundling a device in with a subscription. The deal was seen as pretty poor for the newspaper proprietors and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch publicly stated he would introduce his own ebook reader to bundle with News Corp newspaper subscriptions. Well now he doesn’t have to and there must be a race on from all of the new ereader combatants to be the first to sign his exclusive support for the Wall Street Journal he bought last year. Currently it is still available on Kindle, despite Murdoch’s public rantings.
The Sony announcement was actually its third new member of the Reader family, called Reader Daily Edition, which it says caps its new line of reader products, joining the Reader Pocket Edition and the Reader Touch Edition which were announced earlier this month. We’d say that the Daily edition almost obsoletes the two previously announced products, and we can see that the naming of the products points heavily for it being used to deliver newspapers on a daily basis, the same as the Kindle 2, but it will also add ease of use to purchasing eBooks.
The Reader Pocket Edition and the Reader Touch Edition are already available but it won’t be until December that we can get our hands on the Reader Daily Edition and even then this will initially only be at SonyStyle stores and SonyStyle.com.
“We firmly believe consumers should have choice in every aspect of their digital reading experience,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “Today, we take another large stride to deliver on that promise. We now have the most affordable devices on the market, the greatest access to free and affordable eBooks through The eBook Store from Sony and our affiliated ecosystem, and now round out our Reader offering with a wireless device that lets consumer purchase and download content on the go.”
The Daily Edition will come in at $399 (expensive but cheaper than Kindle 2) and users either buy books over cellular from the online Sony store or side load books and documents using a USB connection. The device is seven inches wide, has a touch screen display and portrait mode offers between 30 and 35 lines of text, making the experience similar to a printed paperback book. It has the usual high contrast ratio with 16 levels of greyscale, which is why it will be a while before ebook readers merge into the general morass of cellular handsets ‘ the screens just simply aren’t good enough. The Daily Edition can hold a thousand standard eBooks and it has additional expansion slots for memory cards.
By comparison the Pocket Edition has a five inch display, needs external controls because it is not touch sensitive, can hold just 350 books and costs $199, while the Touch Edition costs $299 offers touch, and a 6 inch screen, offers annotation in the margins, and with extra memory will carry 13,000 books, and offers 75,000 page turns on one battery charge, so it is more or less the same as the Daily Edition except for the cellular connection.
All three models use the E Ink Vizplex paper display which emulates the look of ink on paper and Sony’s eBook Library software version 3.0, which now includes support for many Apple Macintosh computers as well as PCs, for transferring books and can read Adobe PDFs, Microsoft Word files, BBeB files, or other text file formats. Sony has significantly just announced support for the EPUB format, the International Digital Publishing Forum’s XML based standard format for reflowable digital books and publications.
The EPUB format provides for Sony customers to get content from 200 members of the American Booksellers Association; BooksOnBoard, the largest independent eBook bookseller; NetGalley a connection point for book publishers, reviewers, media, librarians, booksellers, bloggers and educators, and Powell’s Books the largest independent bookseller in the world.
Sony has also recently added one million free public domain books to its eBook store from Google along with New York Times bestsellers for $9.99 each. The readers will also be on sale at Best Buy, BJs, Borders, Sam’s Club, Staples, Target, Toys”R”Us, Wal-Mart and other authorized retailers nationwide.
Sony has also announced a new Library Finder application for book rentals, which it has built with OverDrive a distributor of eBooks. Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network now offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library’s download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library’s lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.
Now Verizon Wireless will be under investor scrutiny after hinting that its own device and ebook connectivity service was coming a few months back. Each ebook reader is seen as bringing around $2 a month ARPU to the cellular operator, and investors will be looking for a way that Verizon match this AT&T move. Barnes and Noble was thought to be the prime mover behind a Verizon step into this market, but that may now be redundant given that Barnes and Noble has this relationship with AT&T via Plastic Logic.
The fact that there are now devices which use UMTS rather than CDMA2000, makes them eminently more exportable to overseas markets like Europe, so expect Sony to push on and reach this landmark ahead of Amazon. All of which makes you wonder, no matter how much brand awareness and leadership Amazon has, if it can keep up with a manufacturer of the scale and reach of Sony.