An Amazon spokesman would not comment for this article, but Mr. Later in the year, the company will begin selling a third Reader that will, like the Kindle, allow users to buy e-books wirelessly.Īmazon, for its part, believes it can go it alone, without embracing industry standards. Sony recently introduced two new, less expensive devices and announced it was dropping its price for new releases and best sellers to $9.99. “If the business terms and conditions end up being dictated to publishers by one bookseller who has a chokehold over the value chain, publishers are going to have a hard time staying profitable,” said Bill McCoy, general manager for Adobe’s digital publishing business.įor Sony, which introduced its Reader devices more than a year before the Kindle arrived, the move to open formats is part of a strategy to make up lost ground. Then, as now, second-tier players banded together to promote the increased flexibility and choice that open standards gave to consumers. The result was what is known as “lock-in.” Apple built up extraordinary market power and leverage to dictate terms to the major music labels on matters like the price of digital songs.
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Rather, they want to push the e-book industry toward common standards to avoid a replay of Apple’s domination of the digital music business.Įarly this decade, Apple sold music from its iTunes store that was protected by its own FairPlay software and could be played only on the iPod.
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“People need to remember, when they buy books that come with digital rights management, they don’t have the freedoms they normally would have with a book,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manger of the Free Software Foundation, which obtained the signatures of nearly 4,000 authors and tech pundits on a petition saying Amazon’s anticopying software was a “clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.”Ĭompanies like Sony and Adobe do not want to abandon anticopying measures, fearing that piracy of books would run rampant. Bezos, later apologized for the move, but not before advocates used the episode to rail against limitations on digital reading.
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Sony, via ReutersĪmazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Sonys Reader, which will offer books in a digital standard intended to counter Amazon. E-book sales in the United States hit a record $14 million in June, a 136.2 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Association of American Publishers.Īmazon does not divulge its e-book revenue, but analysts say it most likely accounted for a majority of those sales. Sony’s move comes amid mounting concern about Amazon’s market power in the budding category of electronic books. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.” “There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year. Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.Īfter the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins. That would also help them counter Amazon, which has taken an early lead in the nascent market. But some publishers and consumer electronics makers are aiming to give e-book buyers more flexibility by rallying around a single technology standard for the books. Some restrictions on the use of e-books are likely to remain a fact of life.
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Digital books bought today from, for example, can be read only on Amazon’s Kindle device or its iPhone software. Paper books may be low tech, but no one will tell you how and where you can read them.įor many people, the problem with electronic books is that they come loaded with just those kinds of restrictions.