Sony vs. Amazon: Sony has numbers on their side.

Amazon’s Kindle gets a lot of press across the Blogosphere and news boards these days, with the occasional mention of iRex, Sony, and other companies who produce, or are working on digital readers for the consumer market. Well, today is a day to talk about Sony.

In a Press release today, Sony announced its partnership with Google to provide public domain titles to their e-book shop at ebookstore.sony.com. As the press release states, a button on the shops homepage would lead users to Google’s resource of over a half million public domain titles; the best part being, those books are free.

Five hundred thousand free books; the classics from your time in school, the books you loved, the books you hated, all at your beckon-call. Google’s repository of titles alone it twice that of what Amazon is presently able to offer, that alone is enough to sway favor toward the Sony reader.

This extensive library just adds to the already standard features of text size selection, music player, and multiple file format support for personal documents. I think with all that put together, Sony can actually make me forget the joy of physically turning a page.
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Kindle Hack...Out Already?

Quicker than a cat in Chinatown...Amazon's dreams of proprietary content distribution for the Kindle dissolved. Yesterday the announcement came down the wire that Igor Skochinsky, an agitator of the highest intellect and all around smartypants, has deciphered the algorithm that Kindle uses to encode their .azw files (amazon's own little format and modified form of Mobi files). Now Mobi files can be turn into Amazon files...

but the DRM info was still blocking the files from being read by Kindle. He figured this out too. Igor has done us the honor of writing a post with a link to the Python script that handles this conversion process. He tried downloading content from sites like Fictionwise, and it apparently worked out. No doubt, Fictionwise and other sites are gearing up to tap the market of hackers by supporting the hack at their sites. ..Via Engadget.

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