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So here’s my thinking: It’s an accepted notion that if people know that you’ve made a better product then they will choose it.

SONY engineers made a very good product in the SONY Portable Reader System so it should sell very well. But if Sony Readers aren’t selling very well indeed, then that fact should serve as a warning to SONY (and presumably the other manufacturers of eBook readers) that they are doing something wrong.

PROPOSITION: An eBook reader is better than going to the library to get a paper book to the extent that it makes a library of books far more accessible to the public.

PROPOSED: That for the SONY Reader or any other eBook system to succeed there must be a good supply of books: enough to create a useful library.

Modern publishing houses receive manuscripts in digital form and they print books using digitally formatted text. If SONY expects publishing houses to publish their books for the Reader, they must have distributed automated converter tools to enable publishers to transform digital files into BBeB files. This must exist because if Sony failed to provide the conversion tools there simply would not be many BBeB books available, and those that are published would have to be expensed to cover the labor cost of manual conversion. That would make Sony eBooks as expensive as paper books, thus ending the chances for the SONY Reader to reach its potential.

The principle gateway to any advanced civilization is its written record; literature, poetry, history, mathematics and all of the sciences are preserved in written form. Although most of the modern record is copyrighted, the foundational record, I mean the old classics of World Civilization are not.

Isn’t it logical to think that SONY would do all they can to encourage volunteers to put the collection of classic works in BBeB form and encourage the free and wide distribution of the library of classics? Surely Sony must want the Reader to succeed or they wouldn’t have created it, so why haven’t they made their conversion tools available to volunteers to get started converting those thousands of classic books?

There is so much left to do. We need to put a large volume of reader enabled classics in the Public Libraries as well as on-line. Magazine publishers need to start publishing via email to book readers rather than just using the Postal Service. Volunteer translators are needed to translate classics in one civilization into a language accessible to people who speak a different language in order to help knit a true world civilization together. Internet sites are needed to index and describe the importance of the works. Given the place of search tools, all of these efforts need to move forward before Sony and others create some wifi enabled version of the PRS with real search capability. However it seems to me that time is running short for them to get started if Sony wants into the market soon enough to stay in.

So why haven't they put the conversion tools in the public domain?