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Originally Posted by bingle
I think it's just an outgrowth of selling content instead of devices. If you make your money from licensing a platform to music, movie, game, or book publishers (or by being one, in the case of Sony), any unauthorized use of the platform possibly cuts into your revenue - even more so on subsidized hardware, like the game systems.
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Weeeell, as you said the groups are different, my read is that they're trying to create a pool of material to encourage their customers to buy the device, rather than trying to sell the device to sell content (I'm basing that on their allowing PDF/TXT/RTF files). Sure they want to sell the content too, but no one is going to buy the content unless they have the device, and the content is coming from a different section -- as you point out, the sections are pretty disparate.
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Originally Posted by bingle
It certainly seems like they learned *something* from the Librie, but it's still not as open as the Jinke model will be.
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Maybe, maybe not -- it looks like aside from HTML, the Sony Reader does everything the HanLin does, plus BBeB files. They have said that they'll release an SDK -- what ends up being in it, we'll have to wait and see, of course.
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Originally Posted by bingle
Sony is a huge company, with many different divisions. I'm in the Playstation group (Sony Computer Entertainment), and the reader is (I assume) being made by Sony Electronics (which is a separate company). I don't even know who I would talk to in order to figure out who works on that. :-P All the groups are pretty insular.
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Ah, probably my dearest pieces of Sony hardware the SPS(1&2) -- I love the Armored Core Series ... but that's a totally other topic.
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Originally Posted by bingle
Well, I'm in the same boat. I only want to read things, and I don't really care too much about format. However, HTML seems like the best tradeoff between size and precise format control - and Gutenburg ebooks are HTML, ConvertLit outputs HTML, etc, etc. So that would be the one format I'd prefer they support.
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Shucks, is that all? Couldn't you open them in word and save them as RTF and go to town? I thought you wanted to download the entirety of
Sluggy Freelance onto your reader or something complicated like that.
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Originally Posted by bingle
Other than that, I just feel more comfortable with a "generic" reader. It sort of makes the hardware just an appliance, a commodity rather than a "platform". Platforms are generally locked down, walled gardens where you play by the grace of the creator (you can read whatever you like, as long as you buy it through Connect). The difference between the early PC and Macs, I guess, or between the PC and gaming consoles. The platforms have their benefits, but I'd rather have a generic appliance.
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I don't think I'm following you -- I see the appliances as more like the PSP -- it only does one thing, play games, while the platforms, like PCs can do lots of things. The Sony Reader is mostly an appliance in that it mostly just reads texts, but it's also partly both because its Linux OS potentially allows it to do other stuff as well -- play mp3 and AAC podcast files, for starters, and maybe other reader software makers will release versions for the Sony Reader, as they seem to be contemplating doing with the iLiad. Then there are the applications that will spring up that we can't predict, but will love and wonder how we lived without ... which is where the hacking community comes in, actually ... and potentially increases demand, but now I'm repeating myself.