Sony wants to open up a book reader empire

After being beaten to the starting pole by Apple's iPod phenomenon, Sony will take a stab at another consumer media market this spring. The electronics giant that gave us the Walkman — remember Walkmans, those portable radio and tape-playing marvels of the 90s? — will serve up the Sony Reader. This gadget that will sell for about $50 less than the biggest iPod ($349), carries about 160 books, turns 7,500 pages on a single battery charge, and lets readers shop online in the new Sony Connect store for bestsellers and other titles.

It's those other titles that most interest me, since Sony seems to be hinting about making its Connect store a place where a writer might publish a novel or non-fiction book. The prices in its teasing screen-shot (the store's not open yet) show a $19.95 cost for Freakanomics. That's more than $6 higher than the cost at Amazon.com for a digital copy of the book that you read in Acrobat on any computer. Sony will have some work to do in order to get competitive on content. It was the content rights management that killed off the company's chance at catching Apple's wave it began with the iPod tsunami. You could download music from Sony, but good luck at sharing it. It was in a peculiar format, too, and the only way to play your music at first was to convert it to Sony's.

I don't know if Sony's figured out that last roadblock. Fine print on the Sony site says you can read PDF Acrobat files on the Reader, but only if you convert them to the BBeBook format. Same for blogs and newsreader content. Heck, most people don't even know how to use a newsreader, let alone convert its content.

You can't fault the hardware that Sony has built in its efforts. The Reader is lightweight, stylish and small enough to be treated like a paperback. It's got MP3 playing capabilities, so long as your music isn't protected like the tunes you buy at the iTunes music store. Sony is making a big deal of its new screen technology, which is supposed to make reading a digital screen just as comfortable as reading a book.

In the end, it's how many songs or stories or movies you can download that will lift up a new idea like the Sony Reader. If Sony would see the vast collection of under-published novels and books as its new heartland of content, it could offer something not well served already by Amazon and standard PCs. Of course, you'd have to be able to buy these cutting-edge, noveau novels at a fraction of the bestsellers' costs. That won't matter to the writers. We should still make our $3 a book in royalties on this deal, since the "publisher" won't have to buy ink, paper or ship cardboard cartons of our books to the booksellers.