Rumor: Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle Coming to the UK soon

[Nate the great]

According to the Times of London, the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle will be available soon in the UK.

The two biggest publishers in Britain are to offer dozens of likely bestsellers to read on a hand-held screen this autumn in a sign that, after many false dawns, the electronic “ebook” may finally have arrived.

Random House and Hachette, which together control just over 30% of the British book market, are to offer downloadable versions of titles by authors ranging from Delia Smith to Ian McEwan and Michael Parkinson. Every other major publisher is drawing up plans to follow suit, pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback.

Look at that last sentence. "pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback"

The publishers have made the move to ebooks to follow the launch of two rival devices due to come on sale in Britain over the next few months – Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle.

They allow hundreds of novels to be downloaded from publishers’ or retailers’ websites into a lightweight, pocket-sized device costing about £200. Pages are turned by touch rather than by fiddling with buttons, and words consist of black chemical “e-ink” showing through a white surface rather than light glaring from an ordinary computer screen.

“The traditional book will not be dead, nor will bookshops, but this is a major change, with so many titles from now on available as ebooks and with the technology so much better,” said Fionnuala Duggan, head of the digital division at Random House, whose imprints include Ebury, Hutchinson and Century.

It is hoped that, as in America, it will be possible to download books to any of the handsets, rather than exclusively for the Reader or the Kindle. This would avoid the battle between Sony and Amazon turning into a “format war” of incompatible technologies similar to the 1980s struggle between VHS and Beta-max, the rival video formats.

“We hope that there will be inter-operability,” said Duggan, “in other words, that the ebook will work on any device.”

Publishers are being cautious about how far ebooks will displace the paper version, partly because of the many false dawns for computerised books. Numerous titles were published on CD-Rom in the 1990s, but the market declined as the technology was superseded by the internet.

Seven years ago the horror writer Stephen King self-pub-lished his book The Plant online. He offered it chapter by chapter, but abandoned the project after the sixth instalment.

Some other books have been published online, but they have remained a minority, mainly because the technology has been inconvenient, requiring the viewer to scroll down a computer screen to read a page. But publishers believe the public may at last be willing to accept computerised books following the success of the technology in America.

Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking, published last week by Ebury, will be available as an ebook later this year. So will most of the novels of Terry Pratchett and recent books by Joanne Harris and Ian McEwan.

Two celebrity autobiographies, by Michael Parkinson and Julie Walters, are expected to be published in downloadable versions by Hodder & Stoughton and Weidenfeld & Nicholson, which are owned by Hachette.

In America, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle have been on sale since last autumn and about 90,000 titles are now available on them. Customers can order through Amazon, which then downloads the books from its website to the Kindle. It takes less than a minute to receive an average-length book.

The first device to be launched in Britain will be the Sony Reader, probably in late spring. The manufacturer has been working with the Borders bookshop chain in America so shoppers can both buy the device and download books at branches. In Britain, it is understood to be in discussions with Waterstone’s.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle3382159.ece

[Nate the great]

I hope the information he has about Waterstone's is better than his background research.

[Lexicon]

Listing the price of the readers as "about £200" hurts the credibility of the author too.

Bitter experience tells us that any technology that makes it to the UK is almost always priced as if the USD:GBP exchange rate were 1:1. That means that if the devices are indeed released here we can expect the Sony Reader to be priced at £299 and the Kindle at £399.

Also, if we do see the Kindle over here I'd be very surprised if we get free network access thrown in for the life of the device. We might get a years worth of free ebook downloads, if we're lucky.

[IreneDelse]

Originally Posted by Lexicon

Listing the price of the readers as "about £200" hurts the credibility of the author too.

Bitter experience tells us that any technology that makes it to the UK is almost always priced as if the USD:GBP exchange rate were 1:1. That means that if the devices are indeed released here we can expect the Sony Reader to be priced at £299 and the Kindle at £399.

Also, if we do see the Kindle over here I'd be very surprised if we get free network access thrown in for the life of the device. We might get a years worth of free ebook downloads, if we're lucky.

Not all readers that reach the UK are priced like that. See Bookeen's Cybook Gen3, sold online for £245 to UK customers, and €350 to other UE countries.
http://www.bookeen.com/shop/ebook-shop.aspx

[charlieperry]

It's not that hard to get stuff shipped across the Atlantic. They can't price them too highly in the UK market or else everyone will just import them instead.

[cfw123]

But in the US the Sprint EVDO telephone number is built in to the Kindles sold here. Hopefully this is a variable that can be changed like having a new update release, but if it is implemented only in hardware, it won't be that simple.

But believe me, they will do anything to prevent you buying either unit in this country and then bringing it to your real residence outside the US. In business, the monopoly has not gone the way of the dinasaur. Would that it had. I also would like to see celular service telephone numbers be operaterable world wide. But again GSM is not universal as it should be, leaving CDMA also still in use in the US.

Charles Wilkes, San Jose, Calif.

Originally Posted by charlieperry

It's not that hard to get stuff shipped across the Atlantic. They can't price them too highly in the UK market or else everyone will just import them instead.

[Lexicon]

Originally Posted by IreneDelse

Not all readers that reach the UK are priced like that. See Bookeen's Cybook Gen3, sold online for £245 to UK customers, and €350 to other UE countries.
http://www.bookeen.com/shop/ebook-shop.aspx

True, however that is a European product being sold in another European country. I was referring to consumer electronics products first released in the US then in the UK, for those the 1:1 pricing rule seems to hold true more often than not.

Also note that the Gen3 is roughly comparable to the Sony 505 in terms of hardware but is priced at almost £100 more (at the current exchange rate). Consumer electronics items cost more in Europe, people here are used to paying more and companies set their prices accordingly.

Originally Posted by charlieperry

It's not that hard to get stuff shipped across the Atlantic. They can't price them too highly in the UK market or else everyone will just import them instead.

The reality is that the average person on the street simply can't be bothered with importing stuff. They'll pay the UK store prices or simply avoid the product if they think the price is too high.

Sure a few tech savvy people will do the research and import their Readers from the US (in the same way that a few gaming enthusiasts import consoles from abroad) but nowhere near enough to have any bearing on the retail price.

[DaleDe]

As I said they are higher but not as much as you said. You still didn't add the US taxes onto the US price, which depending on the state could be another 8% or more. I do understand that are still differences but it is not as much as you claimed.

Dale

[sonnyred]

Great news. Hope the Sony Reader does come out in the UK this Spring. I was close to importing one but the lack of warranty has been putting me off. Hopefully now it's a non-issue and I'll be soon reading on the slim little machine Can't wait, it's made my day

[Cthulhu]

An interesting thought:

What I see as a huge advantage to the average consumer, especially travellers and voracious readers--wifi/whispernet/whatever--on the Kindle may not work out so well outside the US. Am indeed keen to see how Amazon handles their internet access contracts in the UK, and to see how this affects the sales of both devices.

For the future of technology, kinda hope the Kindle wins. However, since I all ready bought in, hope the SONY wins so that my content survives.

[edsohsmith]

What I see as a huge advantage to the average consumer, especially travellers and voracious readers--wifi/whispernet/whatever--on the Kindle may not work out so well outside the US. Am indeed keen to see how Amazon handles their internet access contracts in the UK, and to see how this affects the sales of both devices.

Lawyers, international copyright, convoluted contracts, these are reasons that Amazon's wispernet we likely not work internationally in the near future. And a reason why Sony's and Amazon's DRM'd bookstores are not operable internationally.

[Cthulhu]

Ed: WRT DRM, do you mean that with disparities in a nation's ridiculous intellectual property laws, a company selling such content in one single format/flavour/locked system could be violated said laws?

Oh, that could be rich. It would be interesting if the profit motivation of publicly held content companies played a large part in dismantling crippling digital rights software.

Anyway, a sleeping elder god can dream while he sleeps, right?
;-

We could have the 'crypto' fight all over again.

[Alexander Turcic]

Some more meat (emphasis mine):

Waterstone's is believed to have signed a deal to stock Sony’s e-book reader when it is introduced into the UK later this year. It is understood that the retailer will be the exclusive vendor of the device in the UK.

The electronics giant is widely expected to reveal next month that its Sony Reader, which retails in the US for $299 (£150), will be introduced to the UK.

Waterstone's is thought to have signed a deal with Sony to sell the device instore from this summer, and has been in talks with publishers about selling e-books.

A number of trade publishers have rushed to announce e-book plans in the past few weeks and have been working hard to clear e-books rights on their backlists. Both Penguin and HarperCollins have adopted the .ePub format, which is expected to be readable on the Sony device following an upgrade.

Waterstone's will be the first bookseller in the UK to sell an e-book device, and the move will put it in direct competition with Amazon.com, whose Kindle reader is expected to migrate from the US to the UK later in the year.

In the US, Borders had an exclusive contract for the Reader until the end of 2006.

link

[astra]

Fingers crossed


(do we have an appriopriate smile for it?)

P.S. edited

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by astra

Fingers crossed



(do we have an appriopriate smile for it?)