Olive Software might be providing Sony Reader support?

[Morbius]

My local newspaper, The Denver Post, has an electronic edition available through their web site that I decided to go look at after picking up my Sony Reader from the local SonyStyle Store last weekend.

The free "preview" version you can access prior to subscribing shows that it was obviously meant to be mainly accessed through the web site, but it is literally the whole paper...front to back, graphics, color, fonts, etc. Viewing it online it looks just like the real newspaper. I saw that it was supposed to be possible to download a PDF version of the electronic edition (though it warns it would be in the 40-50 MB range), but you couldn't test this on the free "preview" version, as it was disabled. So I can't test to see whether or not this PDF version would work well on the SR.

Anyway, I could see that this electronic version was being delivered online using some kind of product from a company called Olive Software. I went to their web site and saw that it appears many newspapers, magazines, and other traditional publishing groups apparently use their product to deliver "electronic editions", with several samples at their site. So I used their online contact form to let them know that I was the proud owner of a new Sony Reader device, and would really like to be able to take my daily newspaper and monthly magazines with me on this device, but that I wasn't sure the current PDF version their product seems to make available for download would be the best format. I pointed out that the BeBB format that the Sony Reader prefers would probably result in smaller files sizes, still include graphics and links, and allow better resizing and viewing. And then I asked if there was any chance that they could get their product to start providing a Sony Reader-compatible version of these electronic editions on the various sites.

Well, not more than 30 minutes later, I received a response to that suggestion:

Thanks for the input, we have looked into that and hope to have
something worked out soon.

I don't know how true that is, or how soon "soon" is, but it's encouraging that a company that seems to help multiple different newspaper/magazine publishers deliver electronic editions is already looking into making it work better with the Sony Reader! So if this sounds like something that might benefit you and the newspapers or magazines you read, perhaps you'd want to go make a similar suggestion on Olive Software's web site, to show them there is some genuine interest in this!

[NatCh]

Link: http://www.olivesoftware.com/

[Bob Russell]

Ironically, page 6 of that Time issue sample on the Olive Software site has an ad for Betamax!

But, yeah, it would be awesome if more publishers decide to make their content available for the Sony Reader!