TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Beware! Sony’s doing another e-book reader: Proprietary mania again?

By David Rothman

Sony did a pretty good job–unwittingly, of course–of setting back the cause of e-books when it released the Librie with a horrid, DRM-hobbled proprietary approach. The E Ink technology was sensational, but the company’s handling of it verged on the mean-spirited. Commercial books vanished after X number of weeks. And at first the Librie, shown here, did not even offer the ability to read nonDRMed books.

Now Sony is at it again, with talk of a new e-reader to be released with the iPod business model in mind and selling for $300-$500. Beware. Maybe the interface will be slick, but short of ample evidence to the contrary, don’t dare trust the company behind it–not after the DRM fiasco in the music area. I wonder if people will really be able to own Sony books for real. How much will they be at the mercy of Sony? The best approach remains a standards-based one of the OpenReader variety. I hope that competitors such as iRex–which in April will release an E Ink reader able to handle HTML and other common formats from the start–can crush Sony. It would also be a victory of consumers and publishers over Sony’s marketing department. Libraries, already stung by the Gemstar fiasco, should especially be wary of Sony unless it adopts truly open standards. The last thing the world needs is the Tower of eBabel approach.

As for the details of the Sony launch, they’re skimpy now, but some major publishers will be supplying content for the new machine, including HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster, which hope to digitize front and back lists–tens of thousands of books. The good news is that as long as this is happening, maybe the same content can also be positioned in OpenReader. That would reduce Sony’s clout with both readers and publishers, A Good Thing, considering the shocking irresponsibility that the DRM fiasco revealed at Sony. Meanwhile here’s a snippet from BusinessWeek via the Librie list:

Can Sony make the iPod of digital books? That’s the plan. At the Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 4 in Las Vegas, BusinessWeek has learned, the Japanese giant plans to unveil a portable e-reader device for the U.S. The new gadget will let users store and view digital books and will sell for $300 to $500, about the same price range as a full-size iPod.

Sony (SNE), which would provide few details about the e-reader, also has agreements with at least three major publishers to sell digital book downloads on its Sony Connect online store — much the way Apple (AAPL) sells music and video at its iTunes Music Store.Back in 2000, a bunch of e-book readers hit the market, only to tank because the technology didn’t adequately duplicate the book-reading experience.

A little hope: Biz Week says that “rather than requiring users to transfer data onto the device with Sony’s proprietary ‘memory stick,’ the reader also will be able to connect via a computer’s USB port and accept standard SD memory cards already found in many digital devices.” Ok, but that still leaves open the issues of the e-book format and the nature of the DRM. I, of course, be delighted if Sony somehow surprised us.

Disclosure for latecomers: I’m one of the ringleaders behind OpenReader.