Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The "two sources" referred to are probably Baen and Fictionwise, both of whom sell books in LRF format.
You're being ridiculous. Many companies sell products on a regional or national basis. It doesn't mean that they regard people in other countries as "second class citizens"; just that there are reasons to only sell in those countries. In the case of Sony, as has been discussed ad nausiam in other threads, the issue is almost certainly that of regional availability of eBooks. It takes time to set up deals with publishers in the different countries and set up book stores, and there are legal reasons why, for example, Sony's US eBook store can't be used by people in other countries. Exactly the same reasons as sites like iTunes and Audible have country-specific sites.
|
It's just frustration - for 2-3 years!
Finally there are alternatives to Sony, so I'm happy to emphasize that issue. Even though you
can get around the shipping limitations now with a few resellers, it's still a restriction that doesn't apply to most of the competition devices. So that's worth highlighting.
I understand your comments on the store restrictions. I'm not convinced that's the main reason, but we'll see how (any) future "negotiations" proceed in other regions.
BTW, do you think Sony will expand their format support in future to include Mobi? Has that been discussed anywhere (I'm sure it has)?
And an obvious point - if Bookeen (CyBook) and Hanlin (V3, BeBook) can do such a good job of supporting multi-formats (not just Mobi/PRC, but FB2, HTML, CHM, DJVU, PDF, PPT, ePub, etc.) why can't Sony? With such a sexy looking device, surely they can see the benefit of including these other formats and making it that much more attractive? Is the Sony Connect store such a big money-spinner for them? In comparison, iPods aren't limited to iTunes-bought music, or even to using iTunes or Mac OS X at all.