Third time lucky for Sony? The Japanese electronics group was an early convert to electronic ink and e-books, but sales of its first e-book reader, like most of the competition, were disappointing.
Undeterred, Sony pressed on, launching a second generation device – the PRS-500 – in the US in September 2006 ( a slightly thinner but otherwise similar model, the PRS-505, replaced the PRS-500 last October in the US and went on sale in the UK a month ago).
Like most of the e-book readers currently on the market, Sony’s models use e-ink technology which uses very little power but can be quite difficult to read in low light conditions.
Unfortunately for Sony, despite its elegant styling, the PRS-500/505 arrived about the same time as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which boasts a number of advantages including cellular wireless connectivity and a much more extensive selection of book titles.
Although Sony has not released any data on Reader sales, potential buyers may also have been deterred by Sony’s insistence on bundling the Reader with a Windows software package called Connect used to purchase e-books online in Sony’s proprietary BBeB (“BroadBand eBook”) format.
Now Sony is trying to address some of the PRS-505’s shortcomings, most of which were identified by my colleague, John Gapper in Why Sony lost the battle of the e-book, with a new 6-inch touch-screen based device dubbed the PRS-700 that will be priced at $400 when it goes on sale at the end of the month – $100 more than the current Reader.
Aside from the touchscreen and the ability to annotate documents using a stylus and pop-up virtual keyboard, the main difference between the PRS-505 and PRS-700 is the addition of integrated LED lighting around the edge of the screen which makes reading in low light conditions much easier.
The new 10-ounce model can hold about 350 books in its internal memory and also features flash memory card expansion slots but crucially is still missing the Kindle’s wireless capabilities. That means instead of being able to wirelessly download content directly to the device (the Kindle has a built-in Sprint EVDO data module), Sony PRS-700 users still have to load books and other e-documents via a PC.
Nevertheless, the new Sony Reader supports a broader range of e-book and document formats and comes with a new software package – eBook Library 2.5 – designed to make it easier to load Adobe PDF documents, Microsoft Word documents, BBeB files and other text file formats to the Reader.
Sony is also promising to expand the selection of e-book titles available online and has redesigned the store to make it easier to use. Sony’s online bookstore currently offers about 50,000 titles while the Kindle store offers more than 180,000, including many bestsellers costing $10 each – a tough act to follow.
