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Originally Posted by VillageReader
I think Sony is less likely to support and/or work with other on another format simply because they plan their own bookstore....
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Not that long ago I'd've agreed with you, VillageReader, but I've been paying a bit more attention to them lately (as I've considered how the various readers look to me), and it seems that Sony's attitude on their store is more that they want to provide a pool of content for prospective Reader buyers (who may have never so much as heard of Project Gutenberg) to say, "hey, I can get content for this easily!" -- I think that marks a difference from their past approaches. A small but significant difference.
I share your confidence that they get a cut, but it's a cut of
nuthin' if there's no one out there with a Reader to buy books from them. Also, remember how insular Sony's divisions are -- the Reader is Sony Electronics' baby, I'm guessing they're going to be primarily interested in selling the
hardware. Absolutely the Connect Store is going to be primarily interested in selling their content, but if there are no Sony Readers sold, then
nobody will buy that content. We're all pretty much agreed that more folks will buy a Reader that looks relaxed about what file types it will handle -- that's why we were so interested to learn that the Sony handled more than just BBeB files natively. I'm just pointing out that there are some pretty good indications that
Sony has seen a glimmer of 'The Light' on the matter.
If they were truly
intent on cutting out other formats, I think they wouldn't support TXT/RTF/PDF, wouldn't have an SD slot, and they'd probably avoid an OS that's open like Linux is like the plague -- it's not like they didn't
notice that the Librie' got hacked about as fast as its packaging hit the floor (from being ripped off the units, I mean).
Because they
did choose Linux, 3rd party apps are pretty much guarantied (and they have to know it as well as we do). Shucks, if Mobipocket (for example) portals for iLiad, how much extra work would it really be to portal for another, relatively similar, Unix device? Whether Sony cooperates or not, I think the other e-book vendors will probably want to portal for the device. And I know the hacker-users will want to if the vendors don't.
But that goes back to what I was trying to say, that iLiad may be more official about it, but I think Sony has set up a system where the
unofficial channels can produce remarkably similar results -- just maybe even faster than iRex's
official ones.
