MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Effect of Kindle on Sony's Content Offerings

pwalker8 · 04-12-2008, 05:01 PM

Interesting. A couple of notes and comments.

First, looking at your SF, most of the books that aren't available in ebook (Dune for example) were first published prior to PC's being common and may not yet be available in electronic form (yes, I know that most of them are available on the net where fans have scanned them in, I'm saying that the original manuscript was submitted on paper rather than as a electronic document). That explains why there are so many odd gaps in book availability. For example, why the third book of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni trilogy being available and the first two are not.

Nivan and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty is available in electronic form from Baen Books and can be downloaded in both formats.

Robert Frost is widely available on the net.

I'm not terribly surprised that some of the public domain and obscure non fiction titles are available on Amazon, but not Sony. That seems to be the biggest gap between Sony and Amazon. Amazon seems to be making sure that every book available in electronic format is available in Kindle format from Amazon and Sony isn't. I'm actually a bit surprised that Amazon hasn't approached Baen books about having their entire selection of ebooks available through the Amazon store. Perhaps they did and there are legal issues. That might be an interesting question to ask on the Baen web site.

04-12-2008, 05:01 PM	#83
pwalker8 Grand Sorcerer Posts: 7,195 Karma: 70314280 Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Atlanta, GA Device: iPad Pro, iPad mini, Kobo Aura, Amazon paperwhite, Sony PRS-T2	Interesting. A couple of notes and comments. First, looking at your SF, most of the books that aren't available in ebook (Dune for example) were first published prior to PC's being common and may not yet be available in electronic form (yes, I know that most of them are available on the net where fans have scanned them in, I'm saying that the original manuscript was submitted on paper rather than as a electronic document). That explains why there are so many odd gaps in book availability. For example, why the third book of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni trilogy being available and the first two are not. Nivan and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty is available in electronic form from Baen Books and can be downloaded in both formats. Robert Frost is widely available on the net. I'm not terribly surprised that some of the public domain and obscure non fiction titles are available on Amazon, but not Sony. That seems to be the biggest gap between Sony and Amazon. Amazon seems to be making sure that every book available in electronic format is available in Kindle format from Amazon and Sony isn't. I'm actually a bit surprised that Amazon hasn't approached Baen books about having their entire selection of ebooks available through the Amazon store. Perhaps they did and there are legal issues. That might be an interesting question to ask on the Baen web site.