Hasta La Gadget!

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to imagine up some kitchen gadgets that have yet to be invented. And if I don’t have a faucet that dispenses hot cheese by the end of the decade, I’ll be pissed.

After letting Kindle dominate the e-book reader market for two years, Sony has fired a huge salvo in return. The new Sony Reader Daily Edition adds wireless 3G connectivity from AT&T, a larger 7-inch screen, and a touchscreen. The company has also created a feature called Library Finder that will allow users to borrow e-books from their local libraries, for free.

The Reader Daily Edition will cost $400 and is expected to be in stores this December.

“Sony has given the market what everyone was waiting for in terms of a wireless device,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst who has been covering e-readers. “Not only that, they have gone one step further, and shown their latest product is no copycat of the Kindle.”

Since Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, e-readers have become a surprisingly hot consumer product category.  Though Sony was the first to launch an e-reader, the company has lagged behind its biggest rival. One key missing feature was wireless connectivity: Until now, Sony Reader users who wanted to purchase or download books had to connect their e-reader to a PC using the USB connection. By contrast, the Kindle has always offered free over-the-air wireless downloads of books through Sprint’s network. Amazon also aggressively pursued publishers, enabling the company to offer a wide selection of popular books for download.

Now Sony is fighting back on both the features and the content fronts. The Reader Daily Edition offers portrait and landscape orientation. In portrait mode, about 30-35 lines of text are visible, offering an experience similar to that of a printed paperback book, says the company. The device has enough internal memory to hold more than 1,000 standard e-books, says Sony, and it has expansion slots for memory cards.

The Reader Daily Edition is the third new e-book reader the company has introduced in the last few weeks. Earlier this month, the company launched a $200 5-inch screen device called the Sony Reader Pocket and a $300, 6-inch touchscreen model called the Sony Reader Touch. Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-reader with 6-inch display sells for $300 and the large 9.7-inch screen Kindle DX costs $490; neither of them has a touchscreen.

Sony Reader’s second big weakness compared to the Kindle has been access to content. Amazon’s position as a leading online retailer of books helped the company offer a wide selection of e-books to Kindle buyers that were competitively priced and easy to download.

To match that, Sony has partnered with OverDrive, a distributor of e-books to libraries, to offer its customers easy access to the local library’s collection of e-books.  Sony Reader customers can use the company’s Library Finder software and check out e-books with a valid library card. Users will have to download the books to a PC first and then transfer them to the Reader. The e-books will expire at the end of the 21-day lending period.

Sony has also said it will adopt the open EPub format in a move that allows consumers to purchase or download books from the Sony store and read them on any EPub-compatible device. In contrast, Amazon uses a proprietary file format that only allows users to read books they’ve bought using the Kindle, or Amazon-sanctioned Kindle software.

“From the beginning, we have said that an open format means more choice for consumers,” says Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “Now, readers can shop around for what interests them rather than be locked into one store.”

Still, it won’t be easy to beat Amazon, says Epps.

“Sony is number two in the market and though they are in a strong position to close the gap with Amazon over the holiday season, I expect Amazon to still be the market leader in early 2010,” she says.

“Amazon has built a very strong relationship with e-book buying consumers that were the first wave of adopters of electronic readers,” says Epps.

Sony’s Daily Edition e-reader will also have to contend with newer rivals vying for a piece of this fast growing segment. IRex, a Dutch company, said Monday it will launch a 8.1-inch touchscreen e-reader in the United States later this year. IRex has partnered with Barnes & Noble to use the latter’s e-books store to power its device. Meanwhile, another company, Plastic Logic, has been working to introduce its notepad-sized 8.5-inch reader targeted at business users.

“Consumers are now split between the small pocket-sized devices with 5-inch or 6-inch screens and the larger screen 8-inch to 10-inch screen readers,” says Epps. “But it is not over yet. The market is still evolving.”

See Also:

• Bookstores Aim at Amazon With E-Readers of Their Own
• Plastic Logic E-Reader Is Slimmer Than Kindle DX
• Buying Guide: How to Choose an E-Book Reader
• World’s First Color E-Book Reader Goes on Sale
• Google Boosts E-Reader Status of Smartphones With Mobile Book

Photo: Sony Reader Daily Edition/Sony

During an event at the main branch of the New York Public Library this morning, Sony unveiled the newest version of its eBook Reader, the Daily Edition (held above by Sony’s Steve Haber), which will have built-in free wireless capability via AT&T’s 3G mobile broadband network. The new Reader, to sell for $399, will be available by December, just in time for the holidays, at SonyStyle stores and via sonystyle.com.

The Daily Edition will feature a 7-inch touchscreen, and a high contrast ratio with 16 levels of grayscale; you can read in either portrait or landscape orientation. It will have enough onboard memory to hold over 1,000 standard ebooks and is also expandable via Memory Stick / Duo and SD card slots.

The company also had a number of its newly available Pocket and Touch Readers available to try out; those readers ($199 and $299, respectively) are available now for purchase. Each of the Sony Readers employs the E Ink Vizplex electronic paper display.

Sony also announced its Library Finder app, developed in partnership with Overdrive.com. Users of Sony’s eBook Store will be able to easily locate their local libraries online, and using their library cards, download free ebook content. when the lending period is up, the content simply expires.

Also new is a Web site for book lovers called Words Move Me, a social networking site of sorts where readers will be able to connect and post favorite passages from literary works. Eventual Facebook and Twitter integration is promised.

After the jump, more images from the event, and a video interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who will be participating in a panel on ebooks at the NYPL later today.

Mark the Former Intern stops by The 404 studio today to shake us out of our slumber…maybe we do need Wilson’s laugh after all! Today we steer through more news about the upcoming “BioShock” movie, CBS running a video ad in a magazine, Jessica Biel (that’s all), Woofer, and more!

We haven’t had Mark the Intern on in a while, so since Wilson is still gone we take the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the host of CNETTV’s The Green Show. We’re all a little sluggish this morning from severe lack of sleep and lingering illness, but we all know laughter is the best medicine, so we rip right into the new “BioShock” movie, slated to come out in 2075. Just kidding, but it’s not far off considering the weekly changes we’ve been reading about in the news!

Next up, we take a look at a creative new video ad to run in Entertainment Weekly magazine this fall. The ad is the first of its kind to appear in print and can handle 40 minutes of video. You can even attach a mini-USB plug and recharge the batteries if you literally have nothing better to do. Although, something tells me Neil Patrick Harris giving the “peace” sign isn’t exactly going to sell boatloads of Pepsi products…

After a Call from the Public (just one), we’re very excited to talk about Woofer, another Twitter clone that requires each post to have a minimum of 1,400 characters, or roughly 500 words. Obviously, we don’t expect the service to catch fire as quickly as Twitter, and in fact many of the early adopters are reaching the minimum by copying and pasting excerpts from the Gettysburg Address and the Old Testament. Go check it out, but you might want to brush up on your writing skills first!

Check out the show and please leave us a voicemail at 1-866-404-CNET and let us know what you think about any of the stories, or just tell us what’s on your mind! If it’s good, we’ll play it on the show. Heck, even if it’s awful, there’s still a good chance you’ll hear yourself on the air!

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Originally posted at The 404

It’s too bad Sony doesn’t have a working prototype to show of its new Daily Edition Reader (pictured on the right), but we got to look at all three of the Readers up next to each other, and it paints quite the picture of familial unity. We asked to see the Daily Edition without its cover, but apparently it’s built into the device — though you can change it out for an alternative, and the battery is replaceable. Check out the close-ups below.

Sony’s Readers cozy up for a family portrait originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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