The subject of e-readers or e-books is constantly in the media with new announcements being made by the suppliers on a regular basis. I have covered this subject a number of times, and in this article I am once again coming back to e-readers. In the past week there have been articles in a number of areas on this subject.

The first, and perhaps the most important one came from Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, with plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins. Sony will also scrap its proprietary anti copying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied. Sony will drop its proprietary format unlike Amazon.com, where digital books for example, can be read only on Amazon’s Kindle devices or its iPhone software. The benefit of the ePub format is that it will allow digital content to be read on a wide variety of devices that support or in future will support this format.

It may be the publishers in particular are wary about proprietary formats such as those on the Kindle and are looking for a more open environment. They may also not be impressed with the Amazon business model that appears to retain most of the revenues from downloading of content. In Australia the major newspaper publishers appear to have rejected the Amazon Kindle as a form for delivery of their content. Fairfax Media, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, has rebuffed Amazon's portable e-reader as the way to deliver digitised versions of newspapers to readers on the run.