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ePub victory: Sony ditches propriety format in UK; same ahead for Sony in States?
April 27, 2009 | 5:29 am
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By David Rothman
“Speaking at the Book Fair, Richard Palk, Sony’s new business contents and services manager, said the company was ditching its proprietary format in the UK: ‘ePub has become the de facto UK consumers’ format of choice,’ he said, adding that Reader and ebook sales were above expectations. ‘We see demand for ebooks and digital readers growing in the UK. It’s clear that a reading revolution is beginning.’” – The Guardian and TechRadar, via Mike Cane. Hello, Amazon/Kindle?
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Comments:
Excellent news! This should encourage ePub usage in the rest of the reading devices that have not already adopted it, not to mention publishers that want to sell to all those devices, and maybe remove a proprietary format or two from their catalogs.
Well, it’s all a bit of hot air really.
Unless I am mistaken, UK user have never had access to any titles from the Sony CONNECT store. So, they are ditching something that was never actually there…
As long as SONY requires using Windows to connect to their reader, there is a large population of the buying masses that will not have anything to do with it. The resistance to the SONY Reader is not all about the format of the device, it’s that you have to fiddle with syncing it, and only to a certain OS. Amazon solved this with WhisperNet – but that makes the Kindle quite expensive. SONY could make themselves instantly more attractive to a larger buying public with Mac/Linux compatibility and a WiFi radio for syncing. They’re doing the same thing they did with their digital cameras and betamax – insisting that people adopt their format, rather than quickly realizing the change in the market and working with it, rather than trying to defy it.
Mike’s right AFAIK. Sony has never sold their format outside of the US and Canada. So epub has always been “the” format for the UK.
Epub is becoming ‘the format’ for publishers in Europe for the most part. It’ll be harder in the US for epub to become the defacto format since US pubs have been in the ebook game a lot longer and consumers expect legacy support for whatever flavor they use right now.
Legacy support issues haven’t stopped U.S. publishers from doing whatever they wanted (in terms of proprietary formats and devices) before, so I doubt they would be fazed by it now. We can simply expect, if ePub is seen by them as being that popular and valuable, that they will simply adopt it, and apologize to all those customers whose legacy devices will have outlived their usefulness.
(Not that I’m saying that’s a good thing… just expected, given Big Pub’s track record so far.)
Or… they could simply throw in their lot with Amazon, and let them worry about formats and devices for the U.S. market.
When I started BooksForABuck.com, I supported three formats–HTML, Adobe PDF, and Microsoft Reader. I (foolishly) thought the MS Reader format would ultimately prevail based on my positive experience with my Compaq iPaq). Since then, I’ve added eReader, ePub, Sony, and Mobipocket. Supporting multiple formats is an increasing amount of work for publishers as much as for readers. Don’t blame the publisher, blame the device makers. They’re the ones who keep coming up with proprietary formats. We simply respond to demand.
Rob Preece
Publisher