Sony Book Reader Vs. Kindle
The Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are portable devices for reading books on the go (although they also support audio books, music files and several image formats). Although there are many of these devices on the market, Amazon and Sony are seen as the most active and competitive in this sector, at least in North America. And although the two products offer the same basic functionality, there are quite a few differences in their features.
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The PRS-300 and PRS-600
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On Sony's low end is the PRS-300. It has a 5-inch "e-ink" display (measured diagonally) and 512MB of memory. However, it cannot play MP3s, does not have expandable memory and it does not have a touch screen. The PRS-600 is the next step up. It has a 6-inch screen, expandable memory and audio support. Like the PRS-300, it comes in three colors.
Sony's PRS-2121
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Sony's next step up is the PRS-2121, intended to compete with Amazon's Kindle DX. Unlike the other Sony models, the 2121 has 3G wireless access through AT&T. With the older Readers, your had to physically attach the unit to a computer to access Sony's bookstore and transfer files. The 2121 can download books wirelessly. Unlike the Kindle, however, it does not have a Web browser. But unlike the Kindle, all Sony Readers have support for the increasingly popular "ePub" format.
Amazon's Kindle 2 and Kindle DX
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Although the original version of the Kindle had external slots for memory cards, the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX do not--but they do offer several gigabytes of storage. Their wireless access is provided through Sprint, and you can directly access Wikipedia through this connection. The DX also has the largest display--9.7 inches, compared to the 7-inch display of the PRS-2121. Both units have similar battery life, and both run on Linux. None of these products support Wi-Fi.
Digital Rights Management
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The primary divergence is with proprietary formats. Only the Kindle can access Amazon's Kindle bookstore and read its AZW file format. This bookstore contains the overwhelming majority of Kindle's retail book inventory, with more than 300,000 titles. In this scheme, the AZW files are protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM). Because DRM prevents a user from making a copy of a file or playing on an unauthorized device, these books are technically licensed rather than purchased.
Animal Farm
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A customer does not actually "own" the book, and it can be taken away from them, as in the case of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984." Their print-version publisher determined that Amazon did not have the rights to distribute the digital versions and requested that Amazon remove the digital versions from the Kindles of customers who had purchased the book. Although Sony has its exclusive DRM'ed digital bookstore as well, it has not yet gone to the lengths of deleting products on a customer's device.
A new file format called ePub has been cropping up that does not have DRM like the AZW file format. Therefore, books in the ePub format can be traded and resold just like a physical book. The text is displayed in XML (similar to a website text layout), and it is compressed into a standard ZIP file.
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