Archive for the ‘Sony eBook Readers’ Category
New York Times to Offer Stand-Alone Book Review Section for eReaders no comments
The New York Times currently will cost you $13.99 per month to subscribe on your Kindle, Sony or Barnes & Noble compatible ereader. The NYT apparently plans to break out its Book Review section and make it available as a separate product at an undisclosed price.
PoynterOnline reports that Times director of marketing James Dunn referred to the plan during an interview at the Digital Publishing Alliance. The Sony Reader Store will get the Book Section first in a few weeks, followed by the Kindle store and Barnes & Noble.
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DecalGirl Skins now Available for nook eReader no comments
DecalGirl now has almost a hundred nook skins available. Besides Kindle and
nook skins, DecalGirl also has skins for the Bookeen Cybook Gen 3 and over one hundred skins for the Sony PRS-600 Touch edition. Skins are also still available for the older PRS-505 and PRS-700 ereaders.
Nook skins also come with a downloadable wallpaper that continues the skin picture across the screen. A matte/satin finish option is also available for nook skins.
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Kindle DX Gobal eReader Coming? Sony eReaders get More Newspapers and Magazines no comments
Engadget has a screenshot of an Amazon Kindle DX page that includes the blurb “Kindle DX Now with Global Wireless”. The DX ereader is currently out of stock for another 2 – 3 weeks; perhaps when it returns it will be Kindle DX Global? Amazon had said that it would bring the same international wireless feature to the DX as it did to the smaller Kindle ereader.
Sony eReaders Get a Few More Newspapers
NewspaperDirect announced yesterday that its catalogue of more than 1,400 newspapers and periodicals will be available for Sony’s line of ereaders beginning on January 6.
NewspaperDirect carries publications from 93 different countries in 44 languages.
via Mediabistro.com
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Sony Daily Edition eReader Shipping no comments
Sony announced today that the Daily Edition ereader is now shipping. Customers who pre-ordered from SonyStyle.com through December 20 should receive their new ereaders within the next 48 hours.
The Daily Edition is now backordered and new orders will not ship until
sometime after the new year.
A few days ago Sony announced agreements to add several newspapers to the Reader Store. More newspapers should be arriving soon. You can subscribe on a monthly basis or buy single editions. The Daily Edition will receive newspapers through the wireless connection, while the Touch Edition and Pocket edition ereaders will need to sideload via a computer.
Sony has agreements in place with a host of additional magazine and newspaper publishers. Subscriptions to the following newspapers and magazines will be available soon:
- Barron’s
- The Boston Globe
- The Dallas Morning News
- International Herald Tribune
- The New York Times
- The Providence Journal
- The Washington Times
- The Baltimore Sun
- The New York Observer
- The Denver Post
- The Salt Lake Tribune
- San Jose Mercury News
- Christian Science Monitor
- The Columbus Dispatch
- Reason
- New York Review of Books
More will follow in the coming weeks and months.
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A Few More Things Considered no comments
A roundup of several ereader related news stories from the last few days.
Borders Not Making Their Own eReader
Reuters reports that Borders Group, Inc. CEO Ron Marshall denies that Borders will make its own ereader. He cites reasons such as the expense and time required. Marshall also makes the point that while it may still be possible to launch a successful ereader product, the window of opportunity is closing fast, with the field due to become even more crowded in the near future.
Borders announced a partnership a few days ago with Kobo to sell ebooks on the Borders website. Marshall says that Border’s ebook strategy will be “device agnostic.”
Sounds like a good idea – we really don’t need any more me-too ereader clones.
Sony Gets Exclusive Content from WSJ and MarketWatch
A few days ago Sony announced a new relationship with Dow Jones & Co. for exclusive content from the Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch to be delivered wirelessly to the Sony Reader Daily Edition. Sony will also be offering the only version of the New York Post available on ereaders.
The monthly subscription for the WSJ will run $14.99 or $19.99 for WSJ Plus. The New York Post will be $9.99 per month, and Marketwatch Today will be $10.99 per month.
Sony’s Reader Store only seems to have three other newspapers at the moment besides the Wall Street Journal, though other newspapers should be available soon.
nook gets Rooted & Hacked
Last weekend nookDevs reported that they had successfully rooted the nook ereader, and in the last couple of days they have been apparently getting apps such as a browser to work on hacked nooks.
Rooting an Android-based device gives you administrative rights and the ability to alter system files, and therefore the ability to totally control the device.
This is nothing that the average nook ereader owner will want to do; rooting a nook involves invasive surgery that voids the warranty and could very well brick your ereader. However, in very short order we should begin to see some software hacks for the nook that will be more accessible.
Third party apps for the nook’s Android operating system have been something that some fans of the nook ereader have been hoping and waiting for. Barnes & Noble has so far not commented about nookDevs’ activities. When the nook was officially announced B&N kind of sort of left the door ajar to apps, but I doubt that they would be happy with a browser that would eat up bandwidth that B&N would be paying for. But wait, the nook has WiFi as well as an AT&T connection. Perhaps a browser that would work when the nook has a WiFi connection could fly.
The latest Kindle Chronicles podcast has an interview with the 18 year old high school student behind the nookDevs website.
Kindle DX Sold Out
Estimated shipping time on the Kindle DX is now four to six weeks.
Notion Ink Pixel Qi Tablet
Slashgear has a report about the first confirmed device to use the Pixel Qi display. The tablet should be unveiled at CES in January.
The device will reportedly be based on the Nvidia Tegra T20 chipset which supports 1080p HD video. There are lots of additional bells and whistles including WiFi and Bluetooth, GPS, digital compass and camera.
Pixel Qi could well prove to be the dark horse of 2010’s several new display technologies. With the ability to switch between a transmissive display mode like a regular LCD and a reflective epaper-like mode, Pixel Qi could be used to make multifunction devices and notebooks/netbooks into very viable reading platforms.
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eBook Store Comparisons – The Second Edition no comments
One of the biggest gripes about Barnes & Noble’s ebook store is their prices; which are higher than the competition, right? Well, hold on a minute there. Barnes & Noble has said that they are working on bringing down prices, and indeed there have been comments affirming this on their forums of late. Time to take a closer look.
Almost two months ago I made an ebook store price and availability comparison between Sony, Amazon’s Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble. In my comparison using just over a hundred books the Kindle Store came out ahead, both in terms of prices and in the number of books available as ebooks. Sony’s ebook store came in second and B&N came in third.
More recently Inkmesh made a much, much larger price survey using 11,604 ebooks. In their case they found that Amazon had the lowest price on 74% of titles. Barnes & Noble came in second and Sony had the highest prices of the three in Inkmesh’s test.
I just ran my test again, using the same books as before and came up with some surprising results.
First of all, what is Sony’s story? Mostly their ebook prices were unchanged from my last test: I found four books on my list with lower prices, but 5 went up in price. None of the paper books previously unavailable as ebooks from Sony have been made available as of yet. What was really strange though, was that I found nine ebook titles that were available before but are no longer showing up in Sony’s ebook store!
Sony just threw out their old proprietary BBeB ebook format and moved to EPUB, and it is possible that their are some search related glitches on their site. I did notice some strange behavior when I searched for ebooks by titles rather than author. So maybe the missing titles are still there, but I just couldn’t find them. At any rate Sony came in at a distant third place in my test. They are not only out of the race based on prices; they apparently also have an incredibly shrinking catalogue.
So how did Barnes Noble fare when compared with Amazon this time? Well, first of all, in terms of availability 80 of the paper books on my list were available as ebooks at the Kindle Store. This seems to actually be down by 1 title from the last time I ran my comparison. B&N had 71 of my titles available as ebooks, which is an increase of 6 titles. Furthermore, if you bought all of the ebooks on my list you would have saved only a little less than a dollar by purchasing them at Amazon. As reader Aoverstreet has pointed out, you would also pay sales tax at B&N but probably not at Amazon (not yet anyway), depending on where you live. It appears to be true that Barnes & Noble is aggressively lowering their ebook prices to match Amazon’s.
Based on the ebooks on my list it appears that the nook vs Kindle ereader competition has turned into a tighter race. This will be even more the case if Barnes and Noble can get the nook’s software issues fixed before Amazon releases Kindle 3. It is a virtual tie now when it comes to prices (again, based on my list of only 110 books). B&N still trails the Kindle Store in terms of content, but it appears that they are working on that as well. Definitely Barnes & Nobles deserves kudos for listening to the complaints of their customers and working to improve on weaknesses.
Matching Amazon’s ebook prices means B&N’s bottom line is going to take a big hit though, especially if ebook sales come to comprise 48% of all book sales as Jeff Bezos says they do at Amazon in cases where a Kindle version is available. On November 24 when B&N reported their financial results for the most recent quarter, they cut their earnings guidance for next year by a lot – almost by half if it comes in at the bottom of the range. This was blamed in part on increased production costs for the nook as the company ramped up its production schedule to meet the higher than expected demand, and “increasing future investments related to its (Barnes & Noble’s) digital strategy, including additional people, technology and in-store marketing support”.
I’m wondering if this “digital strategy” at the time also included planning for much lower prices from its ebooks? Of course, it may be possible for B&N to make up the revenue difference through sales volume, especially if the nook ereader brings in a lot of new customers rather than just converting the store’s present pbook customers to ebook buyers. My point is that I imagine it will be harder for Barnes & Noble to fight a sustained ebook price war than Amazon, which after all has many other streams of income than just book sales.
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Sony’s eBook Store Goes to EPUB Today, Gets Renamed no comments
Sony’s ebook store’s promised conversion to all EPUB format will take place today. The ebook store will also be renamed “Reader Store” and will have a new URL at readerstore.sony.com.
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Sony Dropping eReader Prices in Canada no comments
Thanks to Digital Home for this. In a press release today Sony announced that it will be reducing the prices for its ereaders in Canada.
The list price for the PRS-300 Pocket Edition will go from $259.99 to $239.99 CDN. The PRS-600 Touch Edition will be reduced from $399.99 to $349.99 CDN. The new prices are still almost 20% higher than the prices in the US.
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Cyber Monday Blues no comments
I’m not yet seeing many deals on ereaders for Cyber Monday. Perhaps ereaders are selling well enough without discounts?
Newegg does have a couple of ereaders on sale though. They are selling the Sony
PRS-600 Touch ereader for $279.00 with free shipping. So far this is the lowest price I remember seeing for the Touch.
Newegg also has the Aluratek Libre Reader Pro in white (black is sold out) for $137.00, again with free shipping.
The Libre ereader has a 5” LCD screen without backlighting and supports PDF, TXT, FB2, EPUB, MOBI, PRC, TF, MP3, BMP, JPEG, GIF and animated GIF formats. Thanks no doubt to the LCD screen the battery gets only 24hrs continuous use (or 2 weeks on standby) before needing recharging.
The Libre comes with a 2GB SD card filled with 100 public domain titles.
The Aluratek Libre ereader appears to be based on the same hardware as the Jetbook Lite. The main difference appears to be that the Jetbook Lite uses four AA batteries whereas the Libre has a rechargeable lithium-ion polymer battery.
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Sony Daily Edition eReader Available for Pre-Order no comments
Sony’s Daily Edition ereader with wireless and a 7” e-ink touchscreen is now available for pre-order. The estimated arrival date if you order one is December 21 – 28, at least according to Best Buy.com, so it may not arrive by Christmas.
Sony Style lists a shipping date of December 18 – January 8. One thing to consider is that Best Buy does have a friendlier return policy.
Update 11/19: Best Buy now says “expected to ship 12/18 – 1/8” on the product description. If you click on “Check Shipping and Availability” you are told that the expected arrival time will be 12/21 – 28. Probably orders first in line will start shipping on 12/18.
Sony appears to be expecting the Daily Edition ereader to sell out in the pre-order phase. An article today in Reuters seems to indicate that this is based on the huge number of people that requested notification when a release date was set for the Daily Edition. Just a thought here – I wonder if most of these requests occurred just after Sony’s press conference announcing the Daily Edition ereader, and before the Touch Edition ereader actually became available for review. There have been a number of unfavorable reviews of the Touch, primarily because of readability issues caused by the touchscreen. I don’t expect an improvement of this problem with the Daily Edition, and I wonder how many of these notification requests will result in actual sales. We will have to stay tuned.
