By now it's
old news (two whole days) that Borders and Sony have hammered out an alliance in e-reading, combining their respective developing on-line presences to create a new e-book source (in addition to Borders' new on-line
paper book
sales point).
One of the things we, as an e-reading community, have been concerned about is what sort of long-term commitment Sony might have to this whole e-reader/e-book thing. So I thought I'd share what I'm thinking on the matter, taking into account recent developments, news and rumors.
Let's see, in addition to this Borders/ConnStore alliance, we have unusually reliable
rumors of a follow on model in the PRS line, not a total make-over, more of an incremental move. We also have a full up
press release from Adobe which contains the tidbit that Sony "has committed to embed Adobe Digital Editions technology into its portable reader product line."
Buried in the actual
press release about the new BordConnStore, is the morsel that they are now up to 20k books -- most likely the ConnStore's present holdings, as Borders doesn't
have any e-books that we know about. This then implies that the ConnStore has doubled its holdings since the launch, which is pretty impressive, considering the fact that we know they have
lost some titles along the way. And the ConnStore itself has improved drastically in function over the last year -- in fact, it seems to me that it has improved markedly since Sony dropped the music part of it a few months ago.
So, to summarize: .epub support announcement, doubled available title count, significant ConnStore functional improvements, new on-line alliance with Borders, new PRS model next month.
These all seem to me to add up to a fairly good indication that Sony plans to stick with this e-reading stuff ....
(As an aside, I note here, that they have, as they implied they would about this time
last year, been pretty "hands off" when it's come to user hacks -- that doesn't really fit the present topic, but I find it gratifying, and interesting)
On the counter-indication side, we have ... well, I guess we have that they have been doing only a very limited marketing campaign (certainly you can't call it a "blitz"). That they've only released two firmware updates in eleven months (on a device that was eminently functional out of the box). That they're closing the
music part of Connect, while leaving the e-book part intact.
Call me a skeptic, but none of those strike me as all that compelling negative evidence.
Okay, here's where I get speculative on you. I see two very large companies coming together to bring an e-book store into the world (to join an existing e-reading device). Both parent corporations have great name recognition, and both have excellent contacts and influence within the publishing community. It looks to me like they're moving in a direction that should strengthen .epub's already strong position (by virtue of its being an Adobe product) as a contender for a 'standard' e-book delivery format. It further seems to me that we're seeing a lot of new resources put into this joint effort. I don't see that as pointing toward Sony bailing on e-books or e-readers anytime soon.
At the same time, it should be noted that Amazon is doing more or less the same thing that Sony and Borders are doing together, but all on its own (I say on its own because they didn't
partner with Mobi, they
bought them, and they're bringing out their own e-reading hardware), and we've got fairly strong rumors that Mobi expects to support .epub as well.
Where will all this go? How fast will it get there? Are we finally seeing the tectonic shift that will start the e-book revolution?
I don't know, but whatever all this ends up meaning, I think I'm comfortable predicting that it
will shake things up, and I'm optimistic that the results will be good for the e-reading world.
Now it's
y'all's turn. What did I miss? Where am I wrong? And what
should I be thinking.
