In Embracing an Open eBook Standard, Sony Could Pick Up Market Share
by Sam Dean - Aug. 14, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
- OStatic Buffer Overflow...
- E-Book Ecosystem Should Look to Open Source
- It's Not Really a Revolution, But Sony is Embracing Open Source
- Amazon On-The-Go Shopping Hits Android
- OStatic Buffer Overflow...
Sony appears to have made a shrewd move in adopting the open ePub standard--and focusing exclusively on it--for its Reader line of digital books and eBook devices. The company's Reader devices competes most directly with Amazon's increasingly popular Kindle, and with the iPhone's eBook capabilities, and many of readers of eBooks are getting books from Amazon, where they can only be read on those devices. Sony also has its own online store for eBooks. While copy protection will still apply in Sony's strategy, here's more on how Sony can benefit from embracing a very popular open standard.
Amazon has gained much momentum in recent months selling eBooks and Kindle devices, but if you've tried Sony's Reader devices, they're really quite nice. Sony's move to focus exclusively on books in the open ePub standard shows that the company knows that it's business model should be to sell as many Reader devices as possible. I'm still amazed at some of the high prices for eBooks available on Amazon, and Amazon's policies with the books are restrictive.
Writing on GigaOm, Paul Sweeting points out that the big winner from Sony's move may be Adobe, which licenses digital rights management technology, and that copy protection will still be in place for Sony's ePub books:
"While Sony is embracing the open, XML-based ePub standard for delivery and viewing of e-books, those e-books will still come wrapped in copy protection. As part of today’s announcement, Sony said it will scrap its own, proprietary e-book DRM in favor of the more widely supported Adobe Content Server 4 (although the ePub standards has no native DRM the ePub Container format, which bundles e-book content with metadata and other elements for delivery over the Internet, can support third-party DRMs, including Adobe’s)."
As Tech News World points out, one benefit that Sony could get from going to the ePub standard is that it could catch e-book business from users of many other eBook devices. I would add to that that Sony might pick up customers who simply read ePub-formatted books on their computers. You can read ePub books on many free, open source eBook software platforms, including Calibre, and FBReader. (See our coverage of open source eBook resources here, and here.
It will be interesting to watch the competition in eBooks play out between Sony and Amazon. I'm convinced that Sony's choice to go with an open standard for book formats will serve it well.
