[pwjone1]

I think in general Sony's move to ePub formats is a good one. Anything that tends to reduce the balkanization of eBook formats, over the long run, is a good move. Granted, ePub rendoring and especially some of the Adobe software has some "anomalies" (as an aside, the ADE software I find buggy as all get out, so lets hope that the newer stuff is not), but hopefully over time those will be addressed. The tendency of a competitive market is that you improve or the market moves elsewhere. But as with any transition, I think Sony will be challenged to bring it off without some adverse side effects, crashed readers or forced upgrades. Hopefully they'll work through it and it will be something that will serve as a model in the future, when newer editions of books and book readers include more CSS/typography/color/screen size/screen resolution improvements. Hopefully as eBook Readers and formats evolve and improve, it will become the model that you will still be able to read previously purchased books. We shall see. Some of the earlier .mobi to .epub handling by other vendors went not so smoothly, but that's one of the reasons for buying from one of the majors, at least in theory.

I have to say though, that while competitively forced to try and standardize on something other than Kindle/mobi, I just don't see the Sony back-end store being competitive just yet. Oh, it's adequate enough, I have an account there, it does cover the basics. Still, the Amazon store is so much more powerful and function rich, that I'm afraid all price things being equal (and they're basically not, in my experience Amazon still has the best eBook prices, although the margin & number of books that are cheaper has come down), people are still going to go to Amazon. You have the publishers' reviews, all the lists, customer feedback, wish lists, discussion forums, etc. And ultimately, it's probably just as much the iTunes store as the devices themselves that made the iPod dominant for e-music, so don't underestimate the importance of a good backend store. It's crucial. In fact, even in the ePub format back-end stores, I kind of prefer Barnes and Noble. BN is still not Amazon, but it's a lot closer, and you have to give BN credit, they're trying, and they do know books. If it turns out that an ePub off BN isn't compatible with a Sony ePbub enabled reader, or a Sony store ePub doesn't work on a BN/Plastic Logic reader (granted, certain rendering differences, but in general), DRM or not, then what people really want, i.e. device transparency and portability, preservation of investment, hasn't been achieved just yet.

The grass is always greener, and overall the move by Sony to the ePub format is a positive one, but time will tell how this transition all works out. The devil is in the details.