New Sony eBook Store Launched

[NatCh]

Sony Launches New eBook Store

It's a few hours ahead of their 9AM PST launch schedule, but I noticed that the new eBook Store is already live, both on the web and via Sony's eBook Library software.

It's too quick for anything much more than shallow first impressions, of course, but here are the ones I've got so far.

On the web site the new layout seems much snappier and easier to deal with -- most notably, the sliders within sliders appear to have met the quiet end they so thoroughly deserved (think "not with a bang" here). I can't say for certain that they're totally gone, but they didn't rear their ugly heads in a few minutes of clicking around. There's still no way to buy via a browser, but that's not something we were expecting, really, just hoped.

Now turning to the look via Sony's eBook Library software. The look there is ... pretty much identical to the browser look. The drawback to that is that the Library navigator pane shows up on the left, which shoves the Book Store part off my standard ratio screen, requiring a scroll bar to see the whole thing. I imagine that it'd be fine on one of the newer, wide-format screens however -- I'll have to wait 'till I'm on the other computer to check that.

Display of lists of books is pretty similar (minus the scroll within scroll approach) and I noticed that when clicking on an author's name to see all of their books, it displays it in the same way as a regular list of books, rather than on the former "about the author" page arrangement. I count that as an improvement, because it shows more books per page and more information about them the new way, however, I would still like to have access to the "About the Author" info, it was a nice plus over what you find in a "regular" bookstore.

I haven't bought a book in the new system yet, but I did look at my list of things I've bought before. Lo and behold! I saw beside each of my previously purchased books a lovely checkbox, and down at the bottom, a "Download All Checked Items" button. This is a massive improvement! Not earth-shattering of course, but it's nice to see the idea catch on.

Navigation is still a bit underwhelming in some respects, for example, getting to your purchased books requires going through the "My Account" page, but overall ease of movement around the actual pages has massively improved, so I'm going to put that down in the plus column.


Well, that's what I see on a first pass, but I know there are many other differences and improvements. What changes do you see, and what do you think of them?