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By David Rothman

Dating Game TV showSony’s dating game continues, but Reader shoppers can outgame it.

The notice on the Sony Style site still talks about “mid-November” shipment “due to overwhelming demand” for the SonyReader. But, yes, people in the States can already buy Readers from one of the Sony Style stores. Hmm. Will Sony’s marketers ever stop playing hard-to-get games with us?

For those outside the States

At any rate, IF you want to take the Reader to the prom, so to speak, you’ll probably be in luck, even if you’re Geographically Undesirable in Sony’s eyes. For people outside the States, here’s one source of $350 readers marked up to $500—along with my caveat emptor warning that I don’t know the guy. I find it interesting that, “overwhelming demand” or not, he got his hands on 12 of ‘em.

Meanwhile, surprise of surprise, Sony may be keeping the Reader away from competing stores right now—all the better to build “overwhelming demand,” eh? The Reader appeared, then vanished from Amazon.

In Other Reader News…

–The Reader continues to wallop the rival iLiad in the informal TeleRead hardware poll and a similar one at MobileRead. (Update, 8:17 a.m., Washington, D.C., time: Now the two are tied at 18 percent in the TelePoll even though the Sony leads decisively in MobileRead. Are the iLiad folks giving the TelePoll some loving attention?)

–Our friend Dr. Ellen Hage isn’t the only Sony buyer who plans to use the Sony Reader to read DRMed copyrighted works on the Sony.

That might be great news for Sony’s rivals at iRex if the besieged Dutch company will act on it. Here’s why. Sooner or later, Sony customers will get tired of being able to buy DRMed works only in the BBeB format, for which just 10,000 or so books are now available—a fraction of the number in Amazon’s Mobipocket format.

If iRex can offer formats such as Mobipocket and OpenReader (usual disclosure: I’m among the OpenReader ringleaders), then it may yet save the iLiad. While OpenReader doesn’t include a DRM option, its first implementation, dotReader, indeed does. And major publishers continue to keep a close eye on OpenReader as a format to add.

Furthermore, dotReader almost surely could read DRMed Mobipocket if the legalities could be worked out. iRex’s costs of including dotReader for OpenReader purposes would be negligible (and hopefully the same with Mobipocket capability if Amazon weren’t greedy about this).

At any rate, iRex had better come forward ASAP with some good news, given its diminishing credibility in terms of able to meet its specs (and here you thought we beat up only on Sony, huh?).

–A Sony Reader book club from Borders? Maybe. But that won’t necessarily save the Reader if the rumored hardware competition from Amazon happens. The online bookseller will easily be able to out-title Sony. While early adopters fixate on hardware, the typical customer will care far more about the basics—like, er, the number of actual books they can read on their gizmos, whatever the make.

 
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