[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

What Sony can do is jawbone the publishers on pricing, availability, and DRM (actually lack thereof). The Baen model is relevant as ammunition/evidence. I realize that Sony isn't the publisher themselves, and can't control the outcome. They can, however, provide some influence in the right direction. Especially since higher sales helps them as well as the publishers and the consumers.

If in fact they are interested in doing so.

One of the questions I have as a followup is the process by which they obtain content, and the sort of relationships they build with publishers. Amazon is sort of the 800lb gorilla on the book industry. If they say "We want a Kindle edition", it might be hard for a publisher to say no. Sony hasn't got that degree of clout, and may have to tread more carefully.

The need for the Sony Library software is the problem. At a minimum, it should be possible to authorize a Sony reader by entering its serial number into a web site (presumably a site associated with Sony's store). Purchasing from the Sony store should NOT require use of their software. Likewise, there's no reason why one should need Windows do the secure Adobe thing, either.

I concur. Saying "You are freezing out the Mac user by requiring a Windows program, and have you looked at how many Macs are being sold now?" might have a salutary effect.

With just a little thought, they should be able to be completely platform independent. I also note that Calibre is more useful than Sony's software in terms of available functionality... and it's mainly the work of one guy (with clever use of pre-existing open source libraries).

Calibre is suberb...if you are aware it exists and are the sort of person inclined to use it. But I think it would be worth Sony's while to encourage the creation of content for the reader by offering software to do it. Maybe Sony could push Calibre...

On the support for thousands of books, you wrote:

Indeed. I've given up using an SD card for the nonce, because I can't stand paging through the list of books to get to the one I want. One small feature (and one bug-fix: see the P.S. below) is all that stands in the way of letting the community fix the problem for them.

I have about 3,500 ebooks occupying about 1.7GB on SD cards in my PDA. 3,200 are in Pluicker format, and the most are mostly Mobi. Performance is acceptable. It can take Plucker a bit to open the library list, but updates when I've added new titles take perhaps a minute. Mobi is a lot quicker, since there are far fewer titles.

I wonder if things are any better if you use a memory stick instead of an SD card, though I suspect not.

If you have clean HTML (or ePub, or Lit, or Mobi, and probably some other formats as well), Calibre will give you quite a nice .lrf file. And ePub support is coming along.

If Sony really wanted to make some quick progress in the direction of an LRF Creator application, they could do like IBM (or Apple, or Google, or Sun, or ...) and assign one or more of their own software guys to contribute to the Calibre project. It's open source -- they can ship it too! There are plenty of other products that come with open source apps on the install CD; nothing wrong with it.

Yes, that would be nice. The big concern would be making installation and use as easy and bullet proof as possible.

Getting these ideas to the people who actually know would be the second-best outcome we could hope for. The best outcome would be to get the ideas passed down the chain with a strong endorsement from "the President of the whole Division," as that tends to make things actually happen.

Contacting a subordinate with the lead in "The President referred me to you on this one" should have a salutary effect. It indicates he's aware of the issue...

P.S. There's a small technical glitch with my idea for supporting thousands of books on the Sony Readers. The issue is that Sony's firmware exhibits worse-than-linear-time behavior when it scans memory (and SD cards) to identify content after you've changed what's there. I've seen reports of it taking over an hour to do the scan with ~4K books, and running out of battery before finishing the scan with ~8K books. (Those numbers may be off, but the idea is correct). There's obviously an underlying algorithmic problem that needs to be fixed; no reason it should be worse than O(n lg n), but it seems to be. This is another one of those pesky details that Steve won't be the right person to deal with, but...

I'd love to know what it's doing. As mentioned above, I don't see anything like that on my PDA.

Sony may simply be making some optimistically low assumptions about how many books users will have on their readers.
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Dennis