Will competition among EReaders force Sony to sell books abroad?

[Arek_W]

Here is a reply from Sony:

Thank you for contacting Sony Connect!

We want to thank you for your recent purchase of the Sony Reader. The Sony Reader was designed for you to read all types of materials in multiple formats. Unfortunately, if you are not a resident of the United States you will not be able to purchase Connect eBooks from the Connect eBook store.At this time we do not have an anticipated release date for the purchase of e-Books outside the United States.

This does not mean that you cannot get materials to read on your reader. Since the reader is able to display RTF, TXT, PDF (unsecured), and LRF files there are a huge number of places on the Internet you can go to get reading materials. You might wish to check out the following sites for starters:

- www.gutenberg.org
- www.manybooks.net
- www.baen.com

Any site that sells/delivers unsecured reading materials in the supported formats should be able to be read on the Reader. Also, interesting reading from the Web can be copied and pasted into a word-processing program and then saved as an RTF (without photos) for viewing on the Reader.

Please let us know If you have any additional questions or concerns and we will be happy to assist you.
If the information I have provided does not completely answer your question, please update this incident so I may be of further assistance to you.

Pretty sad.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Arek_W

I guess that would be conclusion. But it makes you wonder when ppl who want to be ligit have to be creative. It just buffles me.

If you really want to buy legit copies from Sony there is always the gift card work around mentioned in many threads here. Sure it's jumping through hoops, but it's a solution for some.


Personally I'll stick to buying MS Reader versions, which can be had from many sources, and converting them to Sony format. I don't want to lock into their DRM for fear that they'll close Connect down in a few years like they're doing with the Connect music store.

[igorsk]

Someone should write them to add mobileread to that list

[Arek_W]

So I went a bit furter & wrote:

Customer - 12/01/2007 11:43 AM
Dear,

Thank you for your thorough answer. It's a pity that due to, I guess, legal
requirements, Sony has to turn down customers.

Nice Weekend

Arek

Hello again,
We apologize for any difficulties or limitations you experienced using our Connect eBook service. We will share your concerns with the appropriate department here at Sony in an effort to address them.

We sincerely appreciate all the time and effort that you have taken to explore the service and to share your information and opinions with us. It is very important that we receive this type of feedback so that we may better serve our customers. However do have a great weekend also and Thank you.
If the information I have provided does not completely answer your question, please update this incident so I may be of further assistance to you.


Sincerely,


Customer Support Representative
Sony Connect
http://ebooks.connect.com

I think that all non-US residents who have SONY EReader should send this kind of pain in the "lower end" mails. When they see ppl going for Kindle, Bookean, etc & their sales hit the floor while customers were begging for books for which they wanted to pay they may reconsider. OR it will end up like BETA system or LaserDisks (remember them?)

[dhbailey]

Originally Posted by Arek_W

So I went a bit furter & wrote:
[snip]
I think that all non-US residents who have SONY EReader should send this kind of pain in the "lower end" mails. When they see ppl going for Kindle, Bookean, etc & their sales hit the floor while customers were begging for books for which they wanted to pay they may reconsider. OR it will end up like BETA system or LaserDisks (remember them?)

Thank you for sharing those messages from Sony. Yes, I remember Betamax but more importantly, so does Sony remember that since they were the ones burned the worst by that whole VHS/Beta fight. So when DVDs were about to hit the market, Sony went out and bought its own content (Columbia Pictures and all its subsidiary lines such as Columbia records) so that no matter what happened in the DVD wars, there would be content for whatever format Sony chose to go with.

I agree that people who don't like what happens at Sony's ebook store should complain -- I've mentioned several times when I found prices I thought were out of line (hardcover prices for ebooks which have been out in mass market paperback form at lower prices for a couple of years) and eventually the prices have fallen.

Especially international customers -- I agree that the logic of the traditional paper publishers won't really hold up in a global digital marketplace, and contracts with authors are being rewritten. One problem, though, is the existing contracts which are in place for currently published books. Both the publisher and the author need to agree to renegotiate the contract. The publisher can't simply change the terms of the contract against the will of the author who has already signed the existing contract. So it will take a while for the publishing world, which has always been bound (no pun intended) by tradition, to fully make it into the digital age. That it is happening as rapidly as it is currently is a miracle, in my opinion. And while it may seem glacially slow to some, it really is faster, and in my opinion, smoother than the music industry which simply put its foot down and refused to acknowledge the digital marketplace until way too late and the damage had already been done.

I'm sure the publishing industry is looking at how the recording industry has been decimated by the digital world and therefore is moving faster to avoid the same fate.

And the introduction of the Amazon Kindle may be the final catalyst needed to open the ebook marketplace up more fully -- Amazon's clout is enormous and what it does has a major impact on the marketplace (witness the practical disappearance at least in the U.S. of the much nicer locally owned bookstore which Borders and Barnes&Noble started to destroy and which Amazon nailed the final nails in the coffin for.) Even Borders and Barnes&Noble are hurt by Amazon's enormous power (I can get books far faster from Amazon than my local Borders or Barnes&Noble if they don't happen to have it in stock).

In the meantime, as is always the case, laws do force legitimate customers to become criminals sometimes since the laws are always written with the interests of the wealthiest parties in mind, not necessarily written with the concept of just and fair. That's why so many people, including judges, make the fine distinction that they are courts of law, not courts of justice.

[astra]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

If you really want to buy legit copies from Sony there is always the gift card work around mentioned in many threads here. Sure it's jumping through hoops, but it's a solution for some.


Personally I'll stick to buying MS Reader versions, which can be had from many sources, and converting them to Sony format. I don't want to lock into their DRM for fear that they'll close Connect down in a few years like they're doing with the Connect music store.

The same here. I don't care that I don't have an access to Connect Store. I prefer *.lit shops anyway.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jasonkchapman

A lot of it has to do with publisher vs. distributor vs. retailer. Amazon can sell p-books across the oceans because they're a retailer. If publisher "X" holds US-only rights to title "Y", they're restricted by contract. They can only sell to US-based distributors and booksellers.

But this doesn't seem to affect any other eBook retailer. I can go to MobiPocket, FictionWise, BooksOnBoard, or dozens of other eBook stores and buy eBooks regardless of my geographical location. Why should Sony impose this geographical restriction when all these other retailers don't?

[Arek_W]

Harry, I am with you on this one. Others can, Sony can not.
They could do it as we have in EU in duty free zone, different price for EU buyers if flying within EU, different price if flying from EU to non- EU destination -> price X for US buyers, price Y for EU buyers. Should not be that hard to do it in Connect store

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But this doesn't seem to affect any other eBook retailer. I can go to MobiPocket, FictionWise, BooksOnBoard, or dozens of other eBook stores and buy eBooks regardless of my geographical location. Why should Sony impose this geographical restriction when all these other retailers don't?

Maybe something they had to agree to in getting US publishers to sign on for yet another format? (I really have no idea though)

[jasonkchapman]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But this doesn't seem to affect any other eBook retailer. I can go to MobiPocket, FictionWise, BooksOnBoard, or dozens of other eBook stores and buy eBooks regardless of my geographical location. Why should Sony impose this geographical restriction when all these other retailers don't?

MobiPocket is probably a bad example in this case. They're not in the US, so I doubt they're buying US-only rights. Also, their dealer network includes US companies like FictionWise. Most of the titles being sold in secure MobiPocket are being bought wholesale from MobiPocket. People like FictionWise aren't dealing with the publisher, in that case, they're dealing with MobiPocket.

For the other formats, the e-booksellers may well be going through Ingram/LightningSource, but I don't know that. I doubt a lot of the resellers are contracted directly with the major publishers, but I could be wrong.

The problem seems to occur when there is no middle man, as it is with Sony and Amazon's Kindle.

[HarryT]

Most of the online booksellers seem to deal primarily in three secure formats: Mobi, MS Reader, and eReader. I know that Mobi are the "wholesaler" for Mobi DRM format - do you know how dealers get the LIT and eReader files?

[jasonkchapman]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Most of the online booksellers seem to deal primarily in three secure formats: Mobi, MS Reader, and eReader. I know that Mobi are the "wholesaler" for Mobi DRM format - do you know how dealers get the LIT and eReader files?

No, I don't, but I do know that Ingram, the largest US book distributor, owns LightningSource. In addition to POD services, LightningSource provides DRM, conversion, and distribution services for e-books in all three formats. I'm guessing that's the source of most of the other titles.

OverDrive, the folks that drive the system used by most of the US public libraries I've seen with e-book lending, also provide DRM and conversion services, but they seem to do it as a full package complete with hosted e-commerce. They claim eHarlequin.com as a customer, but I don't know if they also distribute their titles to dealers. Distribution may go through someone else.

[AnemicOak]

I know a number of the LIT files I've purchased were sourced through Lightning Source

Books On Board offers some of their Mobi files sourced directly through Mobi, & some through OverDrive (using Overdrive's DRM server instead of Mobi's). Some they offer through both (the files you buy have a MP or OD designator).

[cstross]

In some cases I'm not sure the publishers know how the book dealers end up with ebooks.

Case in point: Ace, aka Berkley Publishing Group, aka part of Penguin Group, outsource their typesetting to a bureau. And they don't publish ebooks at all -- at least, not directly. What happens is, as I understand it, an ebook vendor (for example, Amazon, for Kindle) talks to their rights department and says "can we have books X, Y, and Z in format Foo, please?". And once they sign a contract -- effectively sub-licensing the right to distribute the book in electronic form -- they can talk to someone in Production and buy in a copy of the Quark or InDesign page layout files, or pay the external typesetting bureau to do the ebook conversion job. They then go away and sell ebooks.

(Note that Baen do not operate like this. At Baen, AIUI the ebook production stuff is part of their standard book production cycle, just like paperback and hardcover editions; no messing around with external ebook publishers, although I think they, too, outsource some of the grunt-work -- virtually no major publishers these days own their own typesetting or printing plant.)

Anyway, the whole process is really messy, even before you consider the US/rest of world rights split nonsense. And yes, that rights split gets applied to ebooks because nobody told the lawyers to redraft their contractual boilerplate.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I know a number of the LIT files I've purchased were sourced through Lightning Source

Books On Board offers some of their Mobi files sourced directly through Mobi, & some through OverDrive (using Overdrive's DRM server instead of Mobi's). Some they offer through both (the files you buy have a MP or OD designator).

Is an ebook in Mobi format any different if it uses MP's or OD's DRM server or is it just the DRM server that's different?

And as for the topic, eReader won't force anyone to do anything. eReader doesn't seem to have much clout these days. eReader is mainly for reading theor format books on a cell or PDA. No eink device supports the format as of yet.

Can we please stop using the term ereader as meaning electronic reader as it has a definition that means something else. eReader is a format of ebooks used with the eReader software to read ebook on your Windows computer, and some cell phones and PDAs.