Sony and the Dutch online retailer
Bol.com (the 'Amazon of the Netherlands') have announced a press conference on August 26th. According to the press release the two companies will jointly 'introduce digital reading' to the Dutch readers. Bol.com will start selling ebooks and Sony will provide the ereaders.
The ebooks sold by Bol.com will be delivered in the ePub format, with Adobe DRM. This means that the ebooks can also be read on the BeBook, Cybook and other ereaders that support DRM'ed ePub.
At least 1.000 popular Dutch titles will be available in electronic format when the ebook shop opens, on September 1. At this moment, only about 600 (new and older) Dutch books are available in Mobipocket format through ebook.nl.
The cooperation is good news for Dutch ebook enthousiasts, especially Bol.com has quite some marketing power. The online store has about 2 million customers, which is about 12,5 percent of the Dutch population. It is expected that Dutch publishers will make more ebooks available soon, but unfortunately, most of them will be quite expensive compared to the printed editions. It is not expected that Bol.com will discount ebooks, like Amazon does.
More info (in Dutch) can be found on
eReaders.nl