Then Amazon announced the Kindle. They would send one to you for evaluation for a full 30 days. If you didn’t want it, just send it back, they pay the postage both ways. It would accept prc, mobi, azw or txt files. I bought one. I had to wait 6 weeks because they had sold out their entire inventory in less than one day.

Amazon knows marketing and customer service. Sony does not.

I love my Sony 650 ereader. As a piece of hardware, it’s a stunning device. But Sony will absolutely not win the ereader war unless 1) they figure out a way to do away with, or integrate DRM seamlessly into the ebook purchase chain, 2) they take responsibility for the DRM software, whatever it is, and they make certain it’s bug free, and 3) Come up with a better name for their ereaders, something other than PRS-650 (Sony: does anyone there do marketing?).

A word on Sony marketing: Sony’s auto-demonstration kiosks at Borders were laughable: you’d pick up the ereader and a voice would start talking, “Welcome to Sony Ereader!” or something like that. You could watch bookish introverts practically sprint to the other side to get away from the kiosk: “Aggh! It’s calling attention to me!” Brilliant marketing plan, Sony! Quite literally, hands off marketing. Might I suggest that next year, you try to market robots to the Amish!

Worse still, the Sony ereader operating system will only display “Charging” when the ereader is plugged into USB. So, when plugged into USB, none of the buttons do anything, and you can’t read any content, making the ereader look like it’s broken. Thus, at every store where the reader is on display and plugged into USB, (and they’re always plugged into USB, to keep them from dying), it looks like all the Sony ereaders on display are broken. Amazon could not have asked for a better competitor.

I have a Kindle, but also just purchased a Sony 350 Pocket. I haven’t gone into the morass that is ADE yet, but loaded a bunch of non-DRM’d books that I converted to epub using Calibre. I was delighted to find that the Sony automatically organized those books into collections based on tags I set in Calibre. I suspect that I’ll use the Sony to read non-DRM’d books loaded with Calibre, and use the Kindle for books that I want to purchase, because purchasing books through Amazon is so easy and because Amazon customer service is superb. I’m going to do everything I can to avoid having to load and use ADE.

Any book worth reading is worth the two or three minutes it takes to load into my PRS505.

Maybe I don’t get it – but somehow that doesn’t bother me.

2. I have over 1300 documents in my Calibre library. If I subtract the zero cost AZW files, the extreme minority of books would remain from Amazon. In the future I will not buy a device that does not support PRC and its siblings or ePub, and I really don’t care if it supports any format with DRM, they are just loaners anyway.

3. I really wanted the Sony 500 when it first emerged on the marketplace, but bought a Kindle instead because it had all the features that I wanted that the Sony did not. I do not regret that choice. I was reading a Baen book on my Palm T|X when I got the Kindle. I loaded that book onto the Kindle, searched for a rather unique word in the story I was reading and finished the book on the Kindle. I can read the majority of my books on either my Kindle or my Mac and those that have DRM if the ability to read them is lost, then I shall turn to the dark net to obtain a hack that allows me to read my books on my devices, no matter which they are, as is my right under the copyright laws of these United States.

A more open eco-system that can support many players at the table – like what Adobe is building – takes more time to get going for sure, but I bet we’ll see the fruits of that begin to noticeably ripen in 2009.

Downloading a new book is now simply a process of hitting ‘download’, telling it to save straight to my ebook reader, and then unplugging it and starting to read. Not quite as easy as the Kindle, I’ll grant you, but not locked into Amazon, or DRMed, and doesn’t depend on being in the US and having cellphone signal.

I have been buying books on my phone/PDA (In the sun, and airports, and hotel lobbies etc etc) for 2+ years now since I got a web capable phone/PDA. I’ve bought from both Fictionwise and Baen, both on the fly. (And Unencrypted to boot!)

Buying the sequel to a book you just finished between flights while stuck in DFW airport standing at your gate is FANTASTIC (Buying after you have already sat down on the plane, but before it pushes back from the gate is Science Fiction made real!), and you are right… Fictionwise and Amazon have figured something out… But Jim Baen figured it out too!

Fail. Apple still exists. Sales up. This is not fanboyism, just cold sales figures. I dropped Mac because I was sick of asking “Is there a Mac version of that?” Now, so much is bundled with a Mac, the question is moot for most functions.

iPhone is a smartphone.
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/quote-timothy-d-cook-of-apple/

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The number of perfectly convenient projects who got perfect reviews generate lots og media buzz sells a few millions units and then fade into oblivion becuase someone else sells a few hundred millions of cheap inconvenient crap, it was what happened to the original apple series, the imac, and microsoft zune. and tons of other products.

You have iTunes as the posterchild but iTunes arent the only successfull music store and mp3 players were already a big business a year before the ipod was realeased so it’s probably a bit doubtfull that iTunes actually created the market for online music.

What your going to see is that just like it was with the original macs everyone who saw one wanted one for about 10 minutes and then decided to head for the store that sold IBM clones, people are going to want kindles or iphones and then in the end choose to buy subnotes or smartphones.

When your getting worked up over the prospect of amazon selling 240k kindle remember that it probably amounts to less then a weeks laptops sales at dell.