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Major news: Sony goes EPUB only; scraps its own format!!
August 12, 2009 | 9:59 pm
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By Paul Biba
This is just fantastic news! Sony is taking a bold step that will benefit ebook readers more than any of us can say. As soon as they come out with a wireless reader I’m going to mothball my Kindle. It’s just a pity there is not EPUB logo, as that would have made a great visual to this story. Of course we still have DRM to deal with, but one step at a time. Here’s the story from the NY Times:
On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.
Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.
After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year.
“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”
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Comments:
Amazon will respond. Too much market pressure for cross-platform use (ePub is the mp3 of reading?), and the online store is not quite a behemoth before which all other stores will bow.
If Kindle adds ePub, they stay the majority reader and store. If they stick with mobi only, they become the new betamax.
Well, that’s nice.
But is there any EPUB-reading e-book app for iPhone that uses Adobe DRM? Does Stanza have it, or are they planning to get it? (Though given that they’re now owned by Amazon, and considering what Amazon did to MobiPocket, I have my doubts they would even if they could.)
Wow, does this ever have a Betamax ring to it. Oh, how I love irony…
@Chris: Stanza may not have the ability to read Adobe DRM, but there’s no reason someone else couldn’t develop an app that did, including Adobe. In the meantime, there are a lot of choices for ePub readers besides the iPhone.
Besides, what’s the worst that can happen if a number of epub devices can’t read DRM’d content? Publishers, wishing to be bought, will remove DRM from their content in order to get sales…
(@Paul: You’re right… we gotta work on that logo.)
i’m inclined to agree with bruce wilson. amazon will need to open the kindle to other formats, and the reason is this: kindle-owners in the main already have a relationship with amazon; one that it would be in amazon’s best interest to nurture, given how much money the current kindle-owners are spending on kindle editions. i think that in these early days of e-ink devices, amazon’s initial plan was reasonable from their point of view. if they were going to sink all of that r&d $ into designing and manufacturing the kindle, they initially needed to guarantee themselves a source of revenue downstream, in the form of e-book purchases. once that customer base has grown to such a level as to be self-sustaining and self-perpetuating (has it already? it’s got to be close..), amazon will be able to change its model and make even *more* money. it will be excellent for owners of other devices to be able to purchase material from amazon, too; but if amazon doesn’t open the kindle to other formats with a firmware update, they will not just lose us kindle-owners — they will have betrayed us; and the customer who feels betrayed will not just silently move on to greener pastures, as we saw in the ’1984′ debacle. especially when one considers the contribution the early-adopters of the technology & format have made to its spread. on top of *that*, we kindle-people are for the most part over the learning-curve, which makes us really cheap in terms of our corporate tech support requirements; and something of a money-maker, when one considers the volunteer technical support that we *provide*. and anyway. everyone knows that it is *much* more cost-effective, and better for the health of one’s business in the long run, to keep existing customers happy, than it is to keep pissing people off and have to repeatedly woo the new & clueless.
Amazon might do even better to simply offer its content in ePub, and let consumers buy and read it on whatever they want.
Amazon got into the hardware business in the first place, as asphalt and others have said, because they needed the hardware and content together to entice the market into the new e-book distribution dynamic. But with so many devices out there now, and more coming, Amazon has to accept that they won’t be able to sell their device to everyone. In fact, they’ve already demonstrated that they can’t keep up with serious consumer demand for Kindles… they’re better off letting someone else handle hardware, and going back to being content suppliers.
And with ePub becoming the defacto standard format, it makes more sense for Amazon to convert their library to ePub (and to either maintain the Kindle format for those users, or add ePub to Kindles… I daresay giving the Kindle reader ePub through a software update would be easier), and allow all those other readers access to their content. They could even sell all those ePub readers…
I have two big concerns coming out of this announcement. First of all, will the Reader now start handling ePubs better? I don’t have one single ePub file that displays as well as the LRFs I bought from Sony’s store. Second, will I now be able to re-download all the stuff I bought in LRF from the Sony store? Because we all know this means that in about five years, the newest Sony Readers won’t support LRF, which then means my files will only be good for the life-cycle of my device.
I suspect that many Sony customers may actually be really disadvantaged in the long run by this. Am I being alarmist?
It’s possible, David. I’d imagine Sony either A) expects the number of disappointed consumers to be relatively small, B)knows there will be many disappointed customers, but believes it is the only way for it to adapt and compete, or C)isn’t thinking beyond this device at all.
But maybe before that happens, someone will develop an LRF to ePub converter, then you’re gold.