[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

How about storage standards? Another nightmare. Proprietary formats all over again. There's Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro and Universal Media Disc. If not for the success of Sony cameras the Clie PalmOS pda line, I don't think anyone would have wanted those media sticks.

Include PSP gamers who dependent on memory sticks. My brother has one of these, and it is for the exact reason why he also decided to buy a Sony digicam, to avoid having to deal with different flash media formats. I guess this is an example what Sony had in mind - to bind their customers to their products through introducing proprietary formats.

Nero gave me a message saying that it can only burn to the one Sony drive it's now tied to! There may be a good business reason for that, and I'm sure Sony got a great deal on the Nero bundle.

In defense of Sony, a lot of optical disc drive manufacturers include the OEM version of Nero which is usually tied to the writer.

Okay, so we are e-book fans, anxiously awaiting the Sony Reader. What are we to think? Is this the beginning of the revitalized Sony, and the start of another Walkman-like product category? Will Sony be the star of e-book and content readers? Or will we live through one more generation of nightmarish format lockdowns?

I am convinced that Sony has the capacity to revolutionize the e-book market, if and only if they take format issues seriously and listen to their customers. Most of what I've seen and read about the Sony Reader sounds promising, and it's now up to Sony to do things right with their Connect Store (hint, Sony: make it cross-browser compatible!).

Sure, there are those that will immediately say that the online Sony Connect store is a step backwards because it uses DRM, and that the Reader is too closed because it uses the BBeB e-book format.

DRM is undoubtly a burden to the user, but if done properly, it's a burden one could deal with. The key is to keep DRM-protected content as user-friendly as possible (which may sound like a contradiction to some). Sony did not win our hearts when they first introduced the Sony Librie and made purchased DRM content expire after a certain amount of time. By now everyone should know that people who buy e-books don't want their content to expire - we've plenty of proof for this.

And with regard to the e-book formats, we see that txt, rtf and pdf are supported, along with other formats like the most common picture formats and mp3.

Definitely a big step forward for Sony. But to succeed they must offer cross-platform compatibility. It should not be too difficult for giant Sony to hire a couple of computer science geeks who'd port the CONNECT Reader Software to Mac OS, Linux and other OS platforms.

So yes, books will be in the BBeB format. But does that really matter very much what format an encrypted book is in if you can't read it on any other device anyway? Until there's a common and universal DRM, it just doesn't matter. More important is how well it ends up working on the device.

Exactly. See my note before. The key is that DRM must not spoil user experience.