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Sony To Convert Online Bookstore To Open Format

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-sony dept.

Dr_Barnowl writes "The BBC reports that Sony is to convert its online bookstore to the EPUB format. While this format still allows DRM, it's supported on a much wider variety of readers. Is this a challenge to the Kindle? It's nice to see Sony opening up to the idea of open standards. Even if you still have reservations about buying a Sony device, you might be able to patronize their bookstore sometime soon."

1 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Great Scott! It Actually Makes Sense! by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From a construction page it looks to rely on XHTML, CSS and XML which, like both the open doc formats, makes complete sense. Not only is it trivial for me to build a document but with a very simple XSLT I can transform all of my epub files to very readable web pages. What boggles my mind is how long XML has been out there and yet we have to wait until now for big companies like Sony to adopt this over something like Amazon's AZW file format. The epub format looks simple and elegant and logical ... I'm honestly a little bit scared that I'm missing something since it's root kit Sony using it.

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    My work here is dung.