Sunday, August 16, 2009

And this is why I love my Sony Reader!



As most of you know I have been trying to go paperless for the last year and I mostly have succeeded. This year, out of 119 books that I have read, only 11 have been paper-books. I think I'm doing fairly well.

When I first looked into which eBook reader I would buy I did some research and searched among those that read the largest amount of formats, because let's face it, eBooks come in different shapes and colors and until the format war was decided I wanted to be able to read all my books in the same device. Well, Sony really did it for me and I have never looked back.

What was great about the Sony Reader was that even though they sold their own format at their eBook store (format was .lrf) it also allowed you to upload .rtf files and .pdf files which for me was a biggie. I can take almost any format and change it to a .rtf file (a real text format is similar to a word document) or a PDF file which made Sony the winner for me.

Well, this past week Sony took the step that us eBook readers have been waiting to hear (from the NYTimes):

On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.

Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.

After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”


Yeah... I love my Reader!

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