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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Kindles in Stock?

Amazon promises to start stocking enough Kindles to quickly quench our thirst for the e-paper reader. The letter of apology, on Amazon’s front page yesterday, from Jeff Bezos was a quick note on their plans to, in the next few weeks, have enough kindles in stock to honor an ‘order-today ship-today’ declaration.

This all comes in the wake of order processing delays of up to a month and a half. Slow order processing apparently hasn’t curbed demand for the unique e-book, however; since their launch at the Union Square W hotel in November, there have constantly been more orders for Kindles, than Kindles coming though the doors at Amazon.

Under estimating demand can be more detrimental than overstocking, as Nintendo found out this Christmas, losing millions on their Wii shortage.

For me Amazon, with this letter, is also making sure that they get enough orders through advertising it on their homepage; so that if the easy availability of the Kindle affects the demand for it, they won’t be overstocked. After all, a product’s exclusivity can breed a higher demand, and if it becomes too commonplace the shininess fades a bit. Plus, you can’t get as much for them on eBay if everyone has one.

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