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By David Rothman

Sony Connect storeSony e-book strategists, not just e-book fans, should read and reflect on the above item from from Gizmodo. The longer Sony relies on its proprietary BBeB format, the more risky for all.

For the company’s sake, not just consumers’, Sony should do as expected and change to Adobe Digital Editions, which can read the standard IDPF epub format, an Adobe-DRMed version, and encrypted and nonencrypted PDF.

Let’s hope that owners can update their Sony Readers, that the change won’t just happen in the forthcoming model.

Survival of Sony’s BBeB-oriented store: Iffy?

But that will still leave me wondering about the purpose and survival of Sony’s currently BBeB-oriented store. How will it be able to compete against Amazon even if the new sony Readers, too, can read BBeB? The store bragged in a promo e-mail about having more than 15,ooo BBeB books available, but even now Amazon/Mobipocket beats it by a large margin—with at least 45,000 titles at Mobi’s store and more to come.

Sony can pour big cash into the store. But will it do so, year after year? Amazon not only has money but also existing relationships with publishers. Will the Sony store vanish? Or might Sony and Amazon work out a deal? Sony is very serious right now about e-books. But that could change, just as it did for PDAs and the doomed music store. Amazon in the future could swoop in to buy the e-book part of the Sony store as a way of bringing Sony Reader customers into the fold and eventually switching them over to future models of the E Ink Kindle machine it has on the way. Under such an arrangement, Sony might agree to get out of the e-book hardware business. Of course, a different scenario would be for Sony to keep selling Readers, store or no store, and in that case it had better embrace epub just as fast as it can and press hard for a DRM-inclusive epub standard.

No BBeB literary renaissance expected

As for development of original content, I’ve heard that Connect charges small publishers hundreds of dollars at the very least and wants to do format conversions itself. True? If so, that’s not exactly the way to encourage a literary renaissance in BBeB, but, again, such a discussion is a little academic since over the long run the format will be vanishing. Efforts to create public domain books in the BBeB format for the Sony are laudable, but Mobi and then, I’d hope, epub will still overshadow BBeB.

The I-told-you-so angle: I personally lobbied Sony to build its e-book business around format standards. Not only could Sony have saved the resource-strapped OpenReader Consortium, but the consortium’s standards could have aided Sony e-book initiative. But that’s ancient history. The game now is at the IDPF, and I hope that Sony will back epub to the hilt.

Not just to pick on Sony today: Well, the Mobipocket software on my DT 375 has once again changed its identification number, probably as a result of a reboot of the DT. The result is that I can’t access commercial books. Who says server failures are the only DRM-related hassles for Mobi owners? And remember, many regard Mobi DRM as more gentle than copy protection from Microsoft and Adobe.

(Screen shot from earlier this summer.)

 
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