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By David Rothman

How can Sony and others beat the Kindle? Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo doesn’t just urge greater ease of use and other improvements? He also writes:

image I’d counsel Amazon’s competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they’d be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he’s got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I’d prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with most online music—but many in the publishing industry would never go for that.) Kindle’s rivals could also get together to create a huge, single ePub bookstore. Publishers would have a big incentive to feed this store with all their books—if they provide books only to Amazon, they’d be helping to create a monopolist in their industry, and that’s never good for business.


Will any of this happen? Perhaps I’m dreaming; it’s been a long time since Sony’s seen a hit gadget, and the new Reader could certainly end up as another failure. But the Kindle hasn’t won yet. It’s not too late to keep it from swallowing up the book industry.

So, gang, what do you think of the above, especially of the lending idea?

 
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