And this bright bundle of glittering generalities does not seem to have helped in the end. Barnes & Noble’s stock was down by as much as 13% after Amazon’s Kindle announcement today, before recovering and finishing at only about 7% down for the day. I imagine any really smart day-traders would have started shorting it last night and stopped a couple hours after the announcement. (Wish I were a smart day-trader.)

The already-embattled bookstore chain really didn’t need this kind of stock hit, but on the other hand it will probably get back some of its own whenever it is ready to announce the new Nooks and Nook Colors it is rumored to have waiting in the wings. But the critical question that B&N, and for that matter Kobo, should be asking themselves is whether they can compete with Amazon on price anymore.

Already I’ve spotted an otherwise-savvy commentator—eBookNewser’s Donna Dilworth—innocently making the apples-to-oranges comparison and wondering whether B&N and Kobo would now have to lower their prices to compete. And that will only be the first of many such comparisons, driven no doubt by Amazon’s own marketing and advertising machine that will be happy to compare Amazon’s “$99 Kindle Touch” to Kobo’s $129 Kobo Touch or B&N’s $139 Nook—when in fact the price of an ad-free Kindle will still be that same $139.

Until and unless they can implement their own “special offers” programs to make up the difference, B&N, Kobo, and for that matter all of the other third-party also-rans like Sony, Astak, etc. are going to be unable to reach the new price goalposts now that Amazon has moved them.

These competitors can certainly try to get the truth out in their own advertising that the Kindle’s price is being subsidized by ads, and that when you compare the ad-free prices they’re the same—but the more complicated the message, the more likely it will go right over the average person’s head. And you just can’t get much simpler than “$79, $99, $149 Kindle,” especially when people who’ve tried them don’t seem to find the ads all that intrusive.

So what will happen? Will competitors find ways to make e-readers cheaper without the ads? Will advertising programs that you pay extra not to have become the default state for all (successful) e-readers? Overall, this simple price emphasis change could have a greater effect on the e-reader market than all the new features and models Amazon introduced combined.

I have my doubts that Sony is going to have staying power in the e-reader biz for much longer, but perhaps it will surprise me. At any rate, if you have a thing for the Sony Reader, have a blast.

Available in red, white, and black colors, the black version (but not the other two) will include a coupon for a free download of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone “while supplies last”. (Because, after all, e-books are known for finite supply and manufacturing costs!)

Harry Potter or no, I have a hard time imagining too many people going for this when competing readers cost $20-$30 less. Sony might be trying to compete on quality, but I suspect the e-reader marketplace is currently focusing squarely on price.

The device costs €165 (equivalent to $240 US) on that website, and will probably be a bit cheaper when and if it’s introduced here—but can it be cheap enough to compete with all the e-readers that are now clustering around the $100 mark and preparing to plunge even lower?

Via The Digital Reader

The piece has some interesting information from anonymous inside sources about what features the tablet will offer:

Amazon’s tablet will have a roughly nine-inch screen and will run on Google’s Android platform, said people familiar with the device. Unlike the iPad, it won’t have a camera, one of these people said. While the pricing and distribution of the device is unclear, the online retailer won’t design the initial tablet itself. It also is outsourcing production to an Asian manufacturer, the people said.

Nowhere is there any mention of the two-faced combo tablet rumor started last week by some guy on an airplane; I would be rather inclined to doubt it at this point. However, it does mention Sony has been showing off a tablet and a dual-screened, wallet-shaped device which will offer access to Sony games, e-books, apps, and multimedia content. Sony hasn’t done very well with its e-book readers so far, and its portable multimedia players have fizzled, but it has had reasonable success in the portable gaming field. It will be interesting to see how this will affect the tablet and e-reader marketplaces.

(Found via Publishing Perspectives.)

VentureBeat’s article, published yesterday, looked at Sony’s poor performance in the ereader wars compared to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, despite having a head start. There’s not a lot of new information for the Teleread audience. However, Sony took issue with the article and responded with this:

It is true that Sony is committed to the Reader category and believes there is a market for both tablets and dedicated e-readers. And, since we have historically released new Readers every year since our initial launch, it is reasonable to assume we will do so again this year. However, the details about a new Sony Reader included in this article are inaccurate. We have not released any pricing, timing or features of a new Sony Reader. When we do have Sony Reader news, we will share all the details with you.

VentureBeat updated their article with the information, but added, “We’re keeping the original report because Sony may just be covering for an unannounced leak.” Either way, I bet Lubell has had an interesting past few days.

The article doesn’t provide much info in the way of hardware specs, but it looks like prices will remain somewhere in the $180-300 range.

As for the tablets—which will incorporate Sony’s ebook platform—you can expect to pay a Sony premium:

Sony may price its two tablets — one clamshell-style with dual 5.5-inch screens and the other with a 9.4-inch touchscreen — higher than some rival products, [Lubell] said, without elaborating.

Read the full article at Bloomberg.com

Also worth noting is that the 2-year e-reader protection plan package is marked down from $50 to $20. Ordinarily I wouldn’t buy those on anything less than a HDTV (and after having worked tech support for HDTVs, I definitely would recommend buying them for HDTVs, but that’s another story), but this protection plan also included a zipper case, screen protector, and screen wipes. The protection is provided by a third party so it will remain valid even if Borders goes under entirely.

After work today, I was curious to see whether the Borders in Springfield, MO had any of these readers in stock, so I nipped over to check it out. And I discovered that they actually had a good number of them. Perhaps bargain-hunters have not been attracted to more expensive items. At any rate, this bodes well for people in other areas with closing Borders that would like to get their hands on them. They did only have one of the protection plan packages left, and figuring that the case and screen protector were probably worth that by themselves, I went ahead and splurged.

I look forward to trying the reader out. I’m given to understand that it’s a pretty decent little EPUB-compatible gizmo (or at least the non-wireless one that Joanna reviewed is, so this one should be even better). I’m not sure how useful the wireless access will be—is it possible to browse the web with this thing?—but as a reader for all my unprotected EPUB files it might just prove first-rate. I’m thinking that after I’ve played with it a while, I’ll follow Joanna’s example and loan it to my parents to see what they think. Maybe I can get my Dad to write a guest review from his non-techie perspective.

The rub here is, of course, that Apple takes a 30% cut of any purchases made within the app itself. And since agency pricing (which Apple had a hand in implementing) means prices must remain constant for e-books no matter where they’re sold…well. This could be problematic for e-books’ future on Apple devices.

Hopefully the same backlash that led to Apple eventually allowing Flash applications and reverting the iPad’s "mute" switch will bring about some chances here. But who can say?

Unfortunately, with little notice, Apple changed the way it enforces its rules and this will prevent the current version of the Reader™ for iPhone® from being available in the app store. We opened a dialog with Apple to see if we can come up with an equitable resolution but reached an impasse at this time. We’re exploring other avenues to bring the Reader experience to Apple mobile devices. We know that many of you are eagerly awaiting the application and we appreciate your continued patience.

The New York Times and 9 to 5 Mac are taking much the same tack as I did in my earlier post: might this spell trouble for Kindle, Nook, etc.? But at Technologizer, Harry McCracken suggests that this may be much ado about nothing. He points out those other news sources have it that the rejection seems to revolve around the idea of “in-app purchases”—that is, that the Sony Reader app was trying to offer an in-app purchase ability, rather than redirecting customers to an external web store where they could buy content. As we noted last year, the Amazon Kindle app was also rejected until it removed its own in-app purchase ability.

The e-reading apps that are already in the App Store don’t permit in-app purchases of books, either. If Sony submitted a Reader app with in-app book buying and was refused admittance to the App Store, it’s only being required to play by the same rules as other e-book merchants. (Apple itself offers iBooks, which offers in-app book-buying.)

He does admit that it’s still possible Apple could be changing the rules to define linking to an external website from within the app as an “in-app purchase” ability, and if that’s the case he would be very upset and end up having to switch to a different phone. But Apple has declined to comment on the reasoning behind the rejection, so it could be a while before we understand exactly what is going on.

Update: Ars Technica’s coverage suggests that Apple has indeed said e-book apps can’t download content purchased elsewhere, in addition to not allowing in-app purchases. If true, this would definitely imperil every other e-book app on the iPhone. However, in the follow-up discussion thread, someone posts information suggesting that the problem is in the methods Sony is using, not the actual practice.

Sony simply needs to make simple changes: use the file system, allow book migration between devices, and stop using a directly connected 3rd party payment system. If they do as Amazon and BnK [sic] anlready [sic] do, it will get approved, and apple still gets $0 from each book sale.

As an aside, isn’t it a bit ironic that Sony’s being locked out of someone else’s platform when another division of the company is trying to do the same to Playstation users? And meanwhile, Sony continues to insist people use its own proprietary memory card standard, at least for some devices (the Sony Reader accepts SD cards), instead of joining the SD card party of the rest of the industry.

(Found via Engadget.)

Sony said in May that it plans to start selling ereaders in China, Italy, Span and Australia this year. In Japan the Pocket Edition will sell for about 20,000 yen ($240) and a bigger screen unit for about 25,000 yen.

The Sony ebookstore says that applications for iOS and Android will be coming in December. According to the site you will be able to access books purchased in the Reader Store, get books from the Reader Store (I presume this means buy them through the application) and make bookmarks, notes, highlights and adjust font sizes.

No date is given for the release.

Kurzweil has responded that the app was still undergoing improvements and a revised version will be released next month. An iOS 4 version is still in private beta. Carmody also mentions the controversy over Blio’s use of Feedbooks feeds without permission, and the fact that the Toshiba Blio store only has a little over half the titles of the main Blio store for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. (Even the main store only has 11,000 titles—considerably fewer than Amazon or Barnes & Noble have to offer.)

But Blio isn’t the only e-reading experience that Wired has found disappointing lately. Terrence Russell from Wired reviews the Sony PRS-350 touchscreen e-book reader, giving it a 6 out of 10. Though Russell finds a number of things to like about the device’s interface, he points out that the $180 device is overpriced by about $50 compared to the capabilities of other e-readers on the market.

Stories like these remind me that Amazon has captured such a large chunk of the market not just  through pricing e-books under $9.99, but also by packing an amazing number of features into a small, easy-to-use, and relatively cheap package. The Kindle really has become the yardstick by which all other e-book readers are measured—and most of them don’t seem to measure up.

The device uses a slightly smaller version of the same Pearl screen as the Kindle, and since it doesn’t have a keyboard it’s a lot smaller than the Kindle as well. It apparently looks very pretty, and the resolution and lack of glare entirely blow away previous Sony offerings (such as the PRS-700 that I reviewed last year).

Then Carmody goes into the two major problems that dog this Sony Pocket Reader: first, it has no Internet connectivity at all, and is reportedly a trifle difficult to load with books. Second, the price is a jaw-dropping $179.99—just $10 less than the free-3G-forever Kindle 3 and $40 more than the wifi-only Kindle, both of which also come with the ability to run net-enabled apps to extend their capabilities.

Sony famously said earlier this year that it was going to compete on quality rather than on price. That may be Sony’s goal, but Sony might have a hard time making it work. The screen may be pretty, but the Pocket Reader offers fewer features at a higher price than the other major readers on the market, all of which also have the advantage of being connected to big-name bookstores.