More than 500,000 copyright-free titles will be made available for Sony’s Reader thanks to a deal with Google, which is opening its massive scanning project for portable use for the first time. The L.A. Times quotes a Sony spokesman saying something we are not accustomed to hearing from Sony spokespersons:
“We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform…” said Steve Haber, president of the digital reading business division at Sony Electronics.
The effect of this deal with Google is to make old public domain texts more convenient to access on the Reader. Bottom line: no more arsing around with Project Gutenberg’s mammoth disclaimers or fixing flow problems caused by hard wrap.
Without WWAN, however, Sony’s Reader’s got its work cut out for it, no matter how much better it looks than Amazon’s Kindle 2.
After praising the Reader’s new selection of classic titles, the L.A. Times all but writes it off, casting Sony’s refusal to add a cellular modem as “mystifying.” [LA Times]
Ugh, how dumb. The one mainstream ereader with support for pretty much whatever you throw at it, without having to email it off to Amazon for conversion like an asshole, and people are still complaining about no 3G access? DUMB.
Well, I must say, this makes the Sony reader look much more attractive all of a sudden. And seriously, if I don’t want online wikipedia browsing while commuting, I can do without the cellular link. Downloading books on my computer and putting them on an SD card is good enough for me.
Now, if only there was a way of getting current titles without being locked down by DRM’d epub files which only work on this reader, but not on that, and with ebook stores which only sell you files you can read with these readers, but not those, and the stupid Adobe software tethering you to an OS which I don’t have, and the idiotic attempts to limit the use of my honestly paid files to a fixed, small number of reading devices …
Apart from that – I could live with not being able to change fonts or justification, and with the missing support for hyphenation and the non-existent search function.*
Sony’s surprising attempts at opening its reader for non-proprietary formats and non-commercial libraries is a promising beginning, but the Adobe DRM thing is a deal breaker for me.
I really hope some enterprising publishers take a lesson from the music industry and start going down a more open road. After that I hope they’re successful and make heaps of money, else we’re doomed to rant this ever-same rant for all of eternity.
* OK, while I’m at it – if the price wasn’t quite as high as it is were I live, that wouldn’t hurt.
Be there, done that:
The iLiad Book Edition…featuring a better-than-Kindle2-screen!
http://www.irextechnologies.com/50_classics
Bonus: they link to two sources of free ebooks.
That is, besides The Gutenberg Project, and Free Ebooks, and… Oh just Google ‘free ebooks’.
#1 Joflow – It took me all of 5 minutes after purchasing my Kindle to find a freeware program to convert files to Kindle compatible. Requires some extra work, but its faster and cheaper than emailing Amazon.
Google’s public domain book library is far larger than Gutenberg.org’s (Which I’ve been loading to my Kindle) and what Amazon offers through its own downloads. Of course, I can download many of those and convert them anyhow, so, thanks Google =)
None of that excuses Amazon for not offering wider file computability to begin with, but its pretty easy to get around and you’re not locked into using Amazon to get your books.
I don’t take e-book readers and more seriously than mp3 players, gps gadgets and portable video file players.
Any self-respecting gadget nowadays SHOULD DO IT ALL WITH GREAT DISTINCTION.
By purchasing this rubbish people perpetuate it.
At best Sony would have offered bring your own access, which compared to Amazon’s free lifetime access would have drawn complaints anyway so they cut costs and left it out altogether.
OK, so I took another longing look at the Sony e-book store. To clarify things: in order to access the store at all, you need to install Sony’s Digital Library software. Runs only on Windows. Adobe has nothing to do with this.
If you want to read DRM protected files (just assuming you’re willing to spend money on such a thing) on a Sony reader, then you would need Adobe’s Digital Editions software as well, as it seems to be the standard for DRM epubs for this device. This seems to at least run on both Windows and Macs, but users of other OSs are out of luck.
Man, this sucks so much. I just want an ebook reader that lets me buy/download and read the books I want. You’re locked out here, treated like a criminal there, prevented from getting at the books if you don’t have the right device or the file is in the wrong format or if the publisher has made a deal with the wrong company – artificial complications at every corner.
Aww, man. It makes physical bookstores look attractive by comparison. That’s so frustrating. I can nearly touch the future … nearly there, but never quite.
My wife just bought a Kindle 2 and it’s pretty damn cool. The bezel that everyone makes fun of actually makes it really comfortable to hold. But I’m holding out hope for the Plastic Logic eReader as a larger, less locked down, but still affordable option. They’re claiming it will be competitive with the Kindle, cost-wise, which makes it a lot more feasible than the iRex products. Unfortunately it’s already moved back to “January 2010″ (from January 2009!) so… here’s hopin’.
The reason I never bought a Sony Reader is because there’s no Mac support.
Simple as that.
The Sony Reader works on a Mac, if you’re running Windows through Parallels or VMware.
But yeah, Sony generally doesn’t offer native support for Mac OS or Linux for some reason. This is a common complaint with their MP3 players as well. Sony finally ditched their Sonic Stage software, but their MP3 players are MTP devices. So you either need Windows or you need to do enable some work-arounds to make it work under Linux.
It’s a real shame. Sony makes some decent hardware.
Why is a 3g modem such a critical feature for an eBook reader? As long as it updates via USB and memory card and has enough internal storage to hold a few dozen books, I can’t see why it’s even relevant to the core functionality of such a device.
Of course the free “lifetime” connectivity offered by Amazon is a killer feature of the Kindle, but they specify they can turn it off any time they want to, which would make me balk at buying one just because of the connection.
First, let me say, I have a Sony PRS-505 and I love it. That said, the lack of Mac compatibility is both frustrating and seriously stupid. I mean, here is an audience that puts a high value on aesthetics, and the more attractive ebook reader won’t work on their computers. Sony has really dropped the ball on that one (not surprising–it has become an amazingly short-sighted company). I have access to both types of computers, but for my friends with Macs, I tell them to go with the Kindle. As for the 3G, this is an issue that reviewers seem to care a great deal about, but which turns out to be much less of an issue out in the real world. Sort of a reviewer’s McGuffin.
As someone who’s been hankering after an eink device for months now, I don’t really care about mobile connectivity. I can’t remember the last time I wanted a novel so badly that I wouldn’t have been able to wait the few hours until I was next near a computer. News and RSS feeds are nice, but there are already free tools that will slurp a news site’s RSS and produce a fresh, personalised newspaper for your device every morning. I can just about survive that amount of forward planning in my life.
The sole reason I haven’t bought one yet is that all the commercially-available books are DRM-crippled. Yes there’s plenty of good, free stuff out there, but the fact remains that a lot of the books I want to read — whether by my favourite authors, recommended by friends, reviewed by sources I trust, etc — simply aren’t available in a format that I can tolerate. Firstly I don’t have a Windows computer, which screws me over for Adobe files. Secondly I regard DRM’d media as buying a license to use it until the issuing company goes bust/gets bored or the player becomes obsolete; there’s no way I’m going to pay almost full price for a book that I can’t loan to my family and probably won’t be readable in a decade’s time.
I’m baffled by the fact that, at the exact same time the music industry is declaring that DRM was futile and only annoyed legitimate customers, the eBook industry’s response to growth is “how can we lock this down even more?”
I think the best way to approach copyright management for eBooks is a watermark. The first page of every book should simply read something like “This copy of [BookTitle] is part of [NameOnCreditCard]‘s libary”. That way non-pirates who’ve “borrowed” a book from a family member get a gentle reminder of where it came from, to act as a nudge to buy their own copy if they really like it. They might also think twice about passing it to all of their friends. Pirates, of course, won’t give a damn – running a script to strip that information out will take exactly the same time as running a script to remove the DRM.
To address some of the complaints above, there are myriad ways to convert books from non-Sony stores to Sony format, a little googling will yield instructions. There is also decent software for managing a Reader on a Mac (or on Windows if you don’t want to use Sony’s software), it’s called Calibre. I’ve had my reader for 18 months (and use Sony’s software via VMWare Fusion on my Mac) and have never cared that it didn’t have a cellular modem. I have a phone if I want wireless web browsing. I like to have a buffer between wanting a book and buying it, it saves me money. I’m really geeked about this particular development since (as Rob said), it means no more dicking around with Project Gutenberg, et al for public domain works.
Note that these books are not compatible with the original PRS-500. Frankly, the Sony eReader store was so bad, it pushed into buying a Kindle 2.
You forget something, Sony’s Reader is available worldwide while Kindle isn’t because Kindle’s “killer” 3G feature hasn’t been feasible yet outside of the States so seeing that the choice isn’t really so “mystifying.”
who needs 3g internet on a bloody book reader? complete rubbish.
in order for these devices to work:
new books have to be a lot cheaper
devices have to be a lot cheaper
until that happens why would anyone want one. amazon marketplace 1p and it sits on my shelf afterwords. mp3 worked because of piracy and convenience. who needs 1000 books on them at all times?
I have a PRS-505 and a co-worker has a K2. I still like the build/design quality of the Sony better.
I get a lot of my books from feedbooks.com which has both CC licensed and out of copyright books.
I’ve found the “epub” format to provide superior reading experience to PDF or LRF (Sony’s native format) on my PRS-505.
Sadly the Project Gutenberg epubs don’t work on the Sony yet…
All kind of academic for us in the UK until amazon actually launch kindle here. Till then I’ll have to stick to reading ebooks on my old pda. I did look at the sony book reader and although the epaper display is cool it didn’t have that “buy me now” feel.