Recently, Amazon sold more Ebooks than it did hardback books. The slashed price of the Kindle meant that sales of the device and the books themselves had made a significant rise. Things are looking great for Kindle at the moment but competition is not letting off and it seems manufactures are anticipate a big future for E-reading and want to establish themselves and leading figures in the industry.
Sony UK, one of Amazons main rivals, has stepped up its game and announced some big news. Firstly they unveiled their own category in this year's Dylan Thomas Prize, 'The Sony Reader Award for Unpublished Writers' (great for unpublished writers but also a great advertisement tool for Sony) and secondly teaming up with Google. The collaboration has created 'Google Books platform' on the Sony Reader website which offers eReader users a huge catalogue of free content, which is searchable by author, title and ISBN number. The eBooks are available in standard open EPUB format to allow for optimal viewing on Sony's range of ebook devices while also being compatible with many other eReaders.
Added to Sony's bookstore and their existing free catalogues, such as Project Gutenberg and local library rentals, readers now have over 600,000! titles to choose from. Amazon on the other hand has 400,000 English language books for Kindle, while the iPad iBookstore offers "tens of thousands of titles."
The product manager for Google Books said "We created Google Books with the vision that everyone around the globe should have the tools to explore the great published works of mankind. Working with Sony to bring public domain books to a broader audience is exciting because we believe open platforms for discovering and reading books are important, both culturally and technologically."
This is all good for Sony who are going to be soaking up a large chunk of the Ereading population, but it's also great to see technology having a positive effect on reading. Hopefully the Ereading trend can help spread all sorts of reading to a wider audience and to help new writers emerge.
Source: Zath