Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon is quickly becoming the Apple of the e-book world, and Sony seems to be quietly hatching plans from second place, in order to unseat the king. One option is freeing up e-book from the DRM they come saddled with. The company announced yesterday that it would be adopted ePub, a book publishing open-standard pushed by companies like Random House and HarperCollins.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” Sony’s president of digital reading Steve Haber told The New York Times. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”

Sony will adopt the standard by the end of the year. Amazon, for its part, is looking to take on the industry by itself, without any such standards. It’s good to be king.