Remember my concern that Apple’s new rules for in-app purchases might imperil e-book reader apps other than its own iBooks? It looks like the process may be beginning. Sony has been trying to bring a Sony Reader e-book app to the iPhone (only arriving about three years late to the party—seriously, why did they wait this long?), but Apple has told them nothing doing. Sony writes on its e-book store site: 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...

Now here’s something I didn’t know, but that will undoubtedly not surprise many. In the New York Times, cyberpunk author William Gibson writes that an early PC virus started out as a fairly primitive attempt at DRM, created by a couple of sibling programmers in 1986 to protect their heart-monitoring software from piracy. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided three telephone numbers, against the day. If you were a legitimate user, and could prove it, they’d unlock you. Computer...

Here’s another one of those cases where publishers could stand to learn from the music industry. The Guardian reports that Universal and Sony Music have decided to start selling songs immediately after they go on the air. Formerly, songs could get as much as six weeks of radio play, called “setting up” a record, before being released for sale to consumers. This would let songs debut on sales charts in high positions, by building demand. However, times have changed considerably since the days when the only way to hear music you didn’t own was over the radio. ...

A few days ago, FutureBook posted about the imminent launch of digital bestseller lists in 2011 by both the New York Times and Nielsen. It seems to be a sign of the increasing maturity of the e-book market that it is finally getting its own bestseller lists. Ironically, thanks to the presence of long-established paper book sales-tracking survey BookScan, it is currently significantly harder to quantify sales of electronic books (which should create a digital record with each single sale) than it is to track paper ones. As e-book sales grow, so the market...

Good news for all the Sony Reader fans out there, and there are a lot of them. 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....

This weekend, Tim Carmody at Wired had a summation of the Blio Windows app’s first few days and the flak it’s taken from reviewers. It reportedly suffers from accessibility problems and text-to-speech conversion issues. 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...

I have lately been thinking about writing an e-book guide for the average consumer—something very simple and basic that breaks down some of the complex issues surrounding e-books into something easy to understand for people who don’t currently know anything about them. Before I begin, I’d like to know what members of the TeleRead community might think such a guide should contain. My new tech support day job has brought home to me once more just what a gap there is between how much the average person knows about computers and how much computer geeks know. In a...

Ebouquin also has a full review of the unit on their site: Vendredi dernier, nous avions rendez-vous dans les locaux de Sony pour la présentation de la nouvelle gamme. Clairement orientée haut de gamme, dans la philosophie de Sony, le marché français va bientôt accueillir deux nouveaux readers, le PRS-350 et le PRS-650 (respectivement, le Pocket Edition, 179€ et le Touch Edition, 249€). Ils remplacent les deux modèles du même nom et auront fort à faire : réaffirmer la place de Sony et montrer son savoir-faire technologique, en particulier avec ce nouvel écran tactile dont nous vous parlerons en détails. En Europe,...

Sony Australia has asked our contributor, journalist Jason Davis, to conduct a poll at his Book Bee site. As Jason says: Sony Australia is holding an eReading industry forum in Sydney on September 16 to discuss the future of ebooks in Australia. And you are invited! Well, in the sense that Sony wants me to get your input. This is your chance. What do you currently like about the user experience of ebooks, what to you hate? What do you think of DRM? What do you see as the future of eReading in Australia? What should happen next? I told them I...

I'm in NYC waiting to get a hands-on with the new devices. However I just received this press release which I'm reprinting in full.  Pictures at the end of the release: SONY BRINGS DIGITAL READING EXPERIENCE TO LIFE WITH THE LAUNCH OF ITS NEW LINE OF READERS New Readers Feature Sony’s Unique Touch Screens with Anti-Glare Technology for the Optimal Digital Book Reading Experience SAN DIEGO, September 1, 2010 - Continuing to provide book lovers with the most natural, immersive digital reading experience, Sony today announced the launch of its beautifully-designed new line of Reader digital books, including the new...

I'll be traipsing into New York tomorrow morning to visit Sony and talk to the VP of the Digital Reading Division for a briefing on the new Sony Readers. Don't know whether it will be under embargo or not, but I'll let you know after the meeting. As I'll be in the City (in 94 degree heat according to Weather Underground!) postings may be a bit thinner than usual....

This is a brilliant essay in the Guardian and I think all hardware reviewers should take note of it. Naughton discusses how people are making an "... an elementary schoolboy mistake, namely the assumption that, in a networked world, it is the hardware that matters most. According to this view, because the iPad, viewed purely as a device, was seen as incomparably superior to the Kindle, it followed that Apple would triumph in the ebooks market." He then goes on to say: In the end, however, it's not hardware that matters, but the effectiveness of the overall system in which the...