[Harmon]

[QUOTE=Phogg;380200 Now if Borders and Hastings will get in the game...[/QUOTE]

Borders is in the game. The Sony site is a Borders site, isn't it? If not, where does Sony get all those books, & why does Borders sell the Readers?

When I read about the B&N purchase of Fictionwise, I had just spent some time reading something called Best of TOC. It included an article by someone who had worked for Peanut Press, eventually acquired by Fictionwise. That business seemed to believe that the ebook business ought to have an open platform and cross-availability of ebooks. And that's pretty much what I see in Fictionwise, given the limitations of the playing field right now.

Now, FW is staying in its own corporate shell, so that suggests to me that they are not going to change their business plan. I think that maybe B&N is the crack in the DRM dike - that they are looking to be a multiformat open platform type of ebook retailer, and have decided that Fictionwise is their vehicle for this enterprise.

Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it strikes me that such a plan would be capable of pulling the rug out from under Amazon/Kindle and Borders/Sony if B&N has enough clout with publishers to insist on them making their books available in multiple formats. It's a kind of Bizzaro version of an open format, but it does sort of get there.

And if it works, both Amazon & Sony might have to open their platforms.