October 2, 2007
New Sony Reader turns a page
Sales of Sony’s Portable Reader System (PRS) have hardly been an open book since it went on sale almost a year ago.
The company has refused to give out figures on units sold of the eBook reader, although an executive insisted, during a demo of a new version to me, that it had "done very well from a sales perspective."
The Reader has appealed mostly to commuters and travellers from major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. It is only sold in the US but Sony is "taking a serious look at a UK launch," he said.
The Reader was seen as a possible breakthrough product that could popularise electronic books when it was first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2006. But it has been restricted to downloads of books bought from Sony’s own Connect store, which has only a fraction of the titles available on say an Amazon.com.
Sony says it had 10,000 titles at launch and this has now grown to 16,000
The successor to the original PRS 500, the 505, is being announced today and will go on sale in time for the holiday season in the US at $300, $50 cheaper than its predecessor.
It is available in silver or black, is slightly wider and sturdier, and has improved contrast on its screen, which now has eight levels of grayscale compared to four before. The page-turn action has been improved, buttons have been added and it can now hold 160 books in its internal memory compared to 80 previously.
But why would anyone want to carry around 160 books at a time? The most books I have ever been reading simultaneously is four. But I suppose memory is cheap and bigger always seems better. The 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary would be nice, but the Reader lacks features to input search terms.
Sony has been collaborating with Adobe to help the Reader deal better with displaying documents in the portable document format (pdf) and perhaps the best news about the new device is that its readers should soon have more choice.
Sony is backing Adobe’s Digital Editions eBook reader software, announced in June. As the standard gains acceptance, a global library of digitised books, beyond Sony’s Connect service, should be available for download and consumption.
