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They definitely do have a number of formats; perhaps you're right that it's just as bad as in the West, but XMDF is one of the leading formats.
There are actually a lot of prose books available in addition to manga (the covers depicted on the web sites often have manga-style drawings even for prose books, so it's a bit difficult to tell what's what - I'm basing my observation on recognizing book titles and authors of prose books).
Anyway, my point is just that XMDF seems oddball to us, but in Japan it's well-established. Actually, looking at the article it sounds like these products will be sold in Japan before reaching the US, and for Japan XMDF is a reasonable choice. For the US, it sounds like they just want to much as possible use their existing system as-is, which means bringing XMDF along. I agree that this is a bad idea; Sony tried it by bringing their BBeB format along when they made the US Sony Reader, and we saw what happened there - they eventually switched to ePub (thank goodness!).
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