A couple months ago, Sony PR flacks sent e-mails to a number of web sites offering to answer questions regarding Sony’s (allegedly) upcoming Reader product for ebooks. Some answers to questions were posted on MobileRead Networks’s forum.
File Formats
Q) What File formats are supported natively and can be put directly on a Memory Stick or SD memory card?
A) With the Sony Reader you can take a file from your PC to an SD or Memory Stickâ„¢ media card and read on the Sony Reader the following file types:1. TXT
2. RTF
3. PDF (Unencrypted)
4. BBeB (Encrypted and Unencrypted)
5. JPEG
6. GIF
7. BMP
8. PNG
9. MP3 (Unencrypted)
10. AAC (Unencrypted). . .
Q) When will the Reader be released for sure?
A) We will announce an exact date as we get closer to the fall season.
It is very odd that Sony doesn’t just go ahead and support HTML natively. That would be a hell of a lot more useful than RTF.
But the big question is will Sony ever actually release this product? They’ve been promising this for almost 9 months now and still have yet to announce an official release date. Is Sony really going to release their Reader product? And if they do, are they really going to sell enough of them at more than $300 apiece to justify launching the product? Color me skeptical on both counts.