For those of us lowly early-adopters who have a Sony Reader and not the OMFGBBQ Kindle, here’s some wonderful news via Engadget:
Sony will be shooting out an update on Thursday to allow the Reader to use purchased books in the protected EPUB format from whoever is peddling them, instead of being tied to the Sony’s e-book store, or just DRM-free text and PDF documents.
The content will still be DRM’d but at least we can buy content from someone other than Sony. (Not that I’ve ever bought more than a dozen eBooks for my reader.)
Michael Sauers is the Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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7 Replies to “Great Sony Reader news!”
Does anyone really care about the Sony Reader? I think n-o-t.
Greg Schwartz FTW!
I care about the news. I have a Sony Reader and I have over 250 books on it. I would like to be able to use it with Overdrive. This might do that.
If the Sony Reader is the only e-book that can display Overdrive books clearly, it is obviously of potential interest to anyone with a computer and a library card.
I’ve not yet tried this myself so I can’t say for sure. However, if you mean the visual quality of the text, I’d assume it’s no better or worse than any other document displayed on a Sony Reader which, IMHO, is perfectly fine.
Does anyone really care about the Sony Reader? I think n-o-t.
Greg Schwartz FTW!
I care about the news. I have a Sony Reader and I have over 250 books on it. I would like to be able to use it with Overdrive. This might do that.
It does work with overdrive, see here
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/07/25/e-bestsellers-and-other-goodies-from-your-local-library-via-overdrive-read-them-for-free-on-the-sony-prs-505/
I care about the news. This might do that.
Are there any problems with the readability of the Overdrive format e-books on the Sony Reader?
This thread suggests that Sony may be selling 28,000 Readers per month. This would create a sizable audience for this type of information.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24845
If the Sony Reader is the only e-book that can display Overdrive books clearly, it is obviously of potential interest to anyone with a computer and a library card.
I’ve not yet tried this myself so I can’t say for sure. However, if you mean the visual quality of the text, I’d assume it’s no better or worse than any other document displayed on a Sony Reader which, IMHO, is perfectly fine.