Good news, PRS-500 owners. Sony’s ePub upgrade will happen by the end of the year, if all goes as planned—so you can enjoy the new ePub format in the Sony eBook Store and elsewhere.
“PRS-500 owners who wish to be notified of the availability of the update may send an email to feedback@ebookstore.sony.com with ‘500’ in the subject line,” Valerie Motis, a Sony spokesperson, tells me. “They will be automatically notified when the update solution is available.” The upgrade topic has come up before, but it’s great to hear things are still on-track.
The PRS-500, now discontinued, was the first Sony Reader. Earlier Sony did offer the Librie, but that was only for the Japanese market.
Technorati Tags: PRS-500
Doh! I loved my PRS-500 but have since upgraded to the Pocket Edition. Oh well, I’m glad Sony has forgotten about the 500.
I meant to say “I’m glad Sony hasn’t forgotten about the 500.”
Excellent news! I still have my 500 and even though I mostly read on my iPhone now, it would be good to be able to use the 500 more.
Did Valerie confirm that Sony will be providing a firmware upgrade for the PRS-500?
This is what Sony said at the time of the $100 PRS-500 to PRS-505 upgrade offer: “We’ve also seen the requests from PRS-500 users about making an upgrade available for that model. After lengthy discussion and investigation of different solutions, we determined that such an upgrade would not be technically feasible.”
The term “update solution” is no clearer than the original “update path”. I assume it will be a firmware upgrade (technical feasibility tends to change when money and lawyers get involved, and Sony would definitely get sued if they switched from LRX to ePub without doing something about the PRS-500) but it woud be nice to get confirmation from Sony.
I’ve still got my PRS-500 even though I do all of my reading on the iPhone (Kindle app). Tihs potential upgrade, and the books I purchased, are the only reason I haven’t given it away (nobody would buy it).