Back in October, when Sony’s new and fairly horrific $350 e-book reader gadget came out, I blasted the company — and some of the people who reviewed the reader — for completely misunderstanding the need for such a product.
We don’t need to carry around 87 different best-sellers in an electronic format that’s inferior to an ordinary book in a dozen critical ways. Rather, an e-book reader is best for giving the ability to read literally millions of books that are out of print, too expensive to print or difficult to find. Sony shouldn’t be aiming for putting John Grisham on their reader, but instead should be chasing Chris Anderson’s long tail of content. Get out of print books and so forth on the reader. Do some deals, write some software, build a website — outofprintbooks.com or something. And Internet content like blogs feeds also seems like a no brainer. As I said at the time:
Sony should quickly reposition the Reader by striking deals with Google and as many publishers as possible to get out-of-print and niche books available online in a proper format. The device would also be great for reading blog posts, news feeds and other web content offline. Sony should add features to its software to highlight that use and make it it one-click simple (like subscribing to podcasts on iTunes).
Well, it sounds like with or without Sony, Google understood what I was saying, at least according to a somwhat vague article in yesterday’s Sunday Times of London (thanks to MobileRead for the pointer). Onward and upward.
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