In the last few months we witnessed the launching of Amazon's Kindle. The marketing strategy was fierce; the new device was being advertised on major TV shows and on the news everywhere, sales skyrocketed in the first few hours. People that weren't familiar with e-ink based technology thought this was the greatest innovation ever; Although the technology wasn't new: Sony had been in the market for almost 2 years with their PRS-505 e-reading device. Even though they were the pioneers in implementation of the e-ink technology they didn't receive the attention the Kindle got. Why? Because Sony's marketing was weak. They focused on other products such as the PS3 and Blu Ray players. They didn't think the niche for e-book readers was that large, but they were wrong: Amazon hasn't been able to meet the demand for kindles. Currently the wait list is of three weeks (reminds me of the Wii euphoria) and the resale price on Ebay goes up from $800.



Is kindle up to the hype? Only if you live in the USA that is. If you live elsewhere forget about buying e-books right from the device itself or loading your own e-books or documents to it. Apple learned that their biggest consumers for their online music store Itunes would be in Europe and it proved right. Europe has a more stable economy and the income per capita is greater. There are currently 17 virtual stores for European customers. Amazon, although it ships paper books to almost all no-conflict zones in the world (about 150 countries) shipping for their e-book reader is limited to the US. territory only.

Sony is also selling inside their e-reading devices in the US. alone but differently from the Kindle this fact hasn't been an obstacle for people from other countries to get one of those. The Sony online store (that looks like itunes) for e-books has limited access to US. residents like Amazon. The only difference between those technologies is the flexibility of Sony's. The PRS-500 and its successor the PRS-505 can be connected via USB to a computer and you can load almost any .rtf (rich text format) and any .pdf you can think of but with the limiting feature that those letter-sized e-books and documents will display a tiny font in the paperback sized 6? screen making them sometimes unreadable.

The solution for adapting documents and non Sony Store e-books for the PRS-505 didn't come from Sony (due to a conflict of interests: they prefer you buy the e-book again from their store) but from another company, the one that produces the PRS-505 formatting software ?Michelangelo?.

Michelangelo: The PRS-505 formatting software has the simplest interface and mechanism for formatting e-books and documents for the Sony Reader. With only a copy-paste operation and pressing 2 buttons you can have your e-book ready to be read in your PRS-505 with a comfortable text size in 8 minutes saving you time and money.

Flexibility in technology is what Sony is showing here by providing options for the use of different formats. We could hope that in the future Amazon displays the same dynamicity by allowing other formats in their devices.