Van L. BakerSony and Google have announced that they will have 500,000 public domain titles available for the Sony Reader for free. This is a very smart move on the part of Sony as it instantly broadens the appeal of the Sony Reader and addresses one of the complaints about the Sony Reader namely that the available library is just too small when compared to Amazon’s 230,000 titles. Admittedly these titles have been available through other means for some time now but this makes it much more convenient for owners ot the Sony Reader to get access to these titles.
More interesting is the contrasting approaches that we see from Amazon with the Kindle and Sony. Amazon’s recent release of the Kindle reader for the iPhone points to the fact that Amazon is focused on selling ebooks and the iPhone applications expands the number of devices that they can sell books to. Sony on the other hand is clearly focused on selling devices as this announcement indicates Sony’s focus is to enhance the value of the Sony Reader. In short Amazon wants to sell more books and Sony wants to sell more ebook readers. The two approaches are likely to appeal to different segments of the market. Sony’s approach will appeal to consumers that read the classics while Amazon’s approach will appeal to consumers that are most interested books on the New York Times best seller list. While neither of these approaches is likely to lead to widespread consumer adoption of ebook readers it certainly adds momentum to the ebook reader market.
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: Amazon, ebook, Kindle, Sony
