Sony drops proprietary eBook format

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 13 Aug 2009 at 14:47

Sony has promised to ditch its proprietary BBeB eBook format in favour of ePub, as it looks to build a credible rival to Amazon.

According to a report in The New York Times, Sony will switch its entire catalogue to ePub by the end of the year, marking a remarkable turnaround in attitude from the company.

EBooks in the ePub format need to be unlocked with Adobe's Digital Editions software and can then be used on five registered devices, with the user free to switch those licenses between devices. In contrast, books in the BBeB format can only be read on Sony's Reader, just as eBooks bought from Amazon can only be read on its Kindle.

If people are going to this eBook shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores

In switching support to ePub, Sony joins ranks with the majority of eBook manufacturers and retailers who already support the standard. It's a canny move from Sony which is making a concerted push in the eBook reader market.

It recently expanded its eReader range with two new models and has signed a deal with Google to offer out-of-copyright texts through its US book store, pushing its list of available titles to over a million.

Asked why Sony had taken this move, a company spokesperson responded: "Sony has strongly and openly backed ePub in Europe since launching Reader in September 2008. On the other side of the Atlantic, when our US ebookstore launched in November 2006, the ePub file format was not at the stage of being commercially-implementable, whereas the BBeB format was one we had been developing since 2002 and immediately offered an excellent, commercially-implementable reading experience.

"It should be noted that as a strong and active member of the IDPF, the non-profit international entity which has brought the ePub format to the market, we willingly brought our seven years of experience in developing BBeB to the table and this knowledge and experience has helped develop ePub into a non-proprietary, commercially-implementable, consumer-friendly optimised file format for digital reading on mobile devices. Our decision to switch the US ebookstore to ePub is entirely consistent with our stated global strategy of making both our devices and ebooks in general as accessible as possible to as wide a range of consumers as possible."