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Sony fired its latest salvo in the battle for the e-book reader market on Wednesday with the unveiling of two new e-readers, one of which will be priced at under US$200.
The PRS-300C is also known as the "Reader Pocket Edition" and is priced at $199, and the PRS-600SC is dubbed the "Reader Touch Edition," priced at $299. They will both be available at the end of August online, at Sony stores and at some retailers.
"It's very clear Sony's realizing it needs to have families of products, not just single products, as Amazon has done with its Kindle and Kindle DX," Mike McGuire, Gartner's vice president of research for media industries, told TechNewsWorld.
"They need multiple products at multiple price points," he explained.
The PRS-300SC has a five-inch display; the PRS-600SC's screen measures six inches. Both have 512 MB of onboard memory.
While the PRS-300SC has three adjustable font sizes, its bigger brother has five. The devices support both the EPUB format and PDF, unlike the Kindle, which supports Amazon's proprietary format.
EPUB is an e-book standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum. It superseded the Open eBook standard in September 2007 and is a free and open standard for reflowable content, which means text that can be optimized for the digital device it is loaded onto.
Both new Sony e-readers offer up to two weeks of reading on a single battery such as Sony VGN-CR390 Battery , Sony VGN-CR4000 Battery , Sony VGN-S4HP Battery , Sony VGN-SZ740 Battery , Sony VGN-SZ750 Battery , Sony VGN-SZ760 Battery , Sony VGN-T Battery , Sony VGN-T90S Battery , Sony VGN-T92S Battery , Sony VGN-TX16C Battery , Sony VGN-TX1XP Battery , Sony VGN-TX25C Battery charge. The PRS-600SC offers touchscreen navigation.
Unlike the Kindle, which offers direct wireless connectivity, both new Sony e-readers require users to connect to the Internet through a PC or a Mac to download content. PCs must run Windows Vista or Windows XP, while the Macs must run OS X version 10.4.9 or later.
Both come supplied with USB cables and have eight-level gray scale screens offering a resolution of 800 by 600 pixels.
Cutting the cost to consumers by offering lower-cost e-readers and slashing e-book prices will help Sony's marketing efforts in this tight economy, but it could end up costing e-bookstores in the long run.
"Neither Amazon nor Sony gets a break on prices from book publishers, so offering e-books at $9.99 costs them," McGuire said. "I don't know how long they can take the loss."
Over time, Sony and other e-bookstore operators may end up becoming more comfortable with tiered pricing, McGuire said. In the meantime, publishers are in some cases pushing back against e-bookstore operators. "There's been a bit of a rebellion from publishers against Amazon's $9.99 price because they are getting $24.95 for hardcovers," Carl Howe, director, anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld.
This is because Amazon, at least, has been releasing e-books on Kindle too soon after the hardcover versions are released, short-circuiting the normal release process, which goes from hardcover to paperback to electronic versions. That process lets publishers maximize earnings from each version.
Still, keeping e-book prices low is the best way to develop the market, Howe said.