Title BUZZards

As this article from wired points out Sony has signed a deal with Google to put the Google Books catalog onto the Sony e-Reader. Giving the e-Reader a 600,000 to 245,000 advantage over the Kindle.

From a practical standpoint the number of books available is pretty meaningless. I'm not going to read 245,000 books in my lifetime let alone 600,000. I've been keeping a fairly steady pace of 30-40 books a year; so I probably won't get a chance to read my 3000th book. Whether I read 1.2% or 0.5% of the books available makes little difference. Both systems have the 5000 or so books I'd like to read, and another 5000 that I would read if I got bored. I'm good on either system without any more books being published.

Of course humans don't make rational decisions. It's why we have sports cars, gambling and kindles in the first place (do not combine - you cannot drive your Corvette with a kindle no matter what the odds). So Sony's title count will convince some people to go Sony over Amazon.

That's not really a bad thing though.

The main difference between the two is size (e-reader) vs. convenience (kindle) - no one is hurt by buying one over the other. Both benefit when anyone starts reading digitally as it helps push publishers into publishing digitally. Neither system is anywhere close to being ready for academic use (page turning is too slow) so making 200,000 academic works available is nothing but pressure.

It's pressure on Amazon to embrace books with expired or open copyrights. It's pressure on both companies to open their platforms with 3rd party book stores (which I predicted in my last post. It's like I'm building an argument by successive use of a theme).

It's all slow, invisible hand of the markets stuff. With a little luck Sony and Amazon will engage in a price war until digital book readers are for sale in 7-11s and books cost $5 a piece (maybe more if the invisible hand shakes us down for more AIG bonus money).

To summarize:

Letting Sony get more books available then Kindle: kindle fail!
Forcing Sony to embrace open formats: success!
Forcing Sony to cut their prices to compete: success!

As meatloaf said - don't feel bad, cause 2 out of 3 ain't bad.