Fascinating week in the land of electronic books and the devices to read them. We got a fresh rumor, complete with picture, about the next generation of the Amazon Kindle which we already know definitely isn’t arriving this year. But the much bigger, non-vaporish news was the announcement of Sony’s third-generation digital book reader, dubbed the PRS-700.
The price is jumping 33% to $399 — more than the current Kindle — but in return Sony has added a new touch screen that lets you turn pages with a swipe of your finger a la the iPhone and without the half second flicker that occurs on exisiting e-ink screens (as an aside, I used to think the flicker was a big downer but I don’t even notice it on my Kindle anymore). The device will also include an on-screen keyboard (again like the iPhone), a surrounding lighting system and a note-taking function.
Paul Biba of the Teleread blog attended the unveiling and reports the bigger if overlooked news that Sony is also planning a major push to improve its ebook store. Sony’s ebook store currently lags so far behind the Kindle store in price and selection it’s not even funny. Plus you still have use your computer to buy books and then load them onto the eReader with a cable. Sony says it will double the number of books available to “about 100,000” by the holidays. That’s still considerably less than the 183,000 ebooks available right now in the Kindle store. And Sony has been notoriously high in its prices, sometimes double the price of the Kindle store. I’ll say the jury is still out on the Sony ebook store improvements.
Biba also reports that Sony has a wireless version in the works, but no predicted timeframe. A Sony official tells Biba that the company want to offer consumers a choice of ebook stores available wirelesslessy. Negotiations to make that happen have delayed the arrival of a wireless Sony ereader.
That’s a plausible explanation but holiday season 2008 is around the corner and Sony will again be competing with the Kindle with a lesser ebook offering and now at a higher price point as well. I’m kind of excited by all improvements in ebook devices that bring us closer to normal but there may be more flash and less substance to Sony’s improvements than meets the eye. Raising prices seems like the opposite of what the ebook market needs at this point.
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