Articles: Amazon and Sony battle it out

Last year Rob Sullivan had the chance to check out a Sony Reader and considered how it compared next to the iPhone and the mobile app Stanza. Now, Dina Patel has a look at the battle to conquer the market for eBook devices so far.

As has already been featured on CompletelyNovel, 2008 saw a sudden interest in the Sony reader and the Amazon Kindle, two very new hi-tech approaches to reading literature. Invented for all book lovers, the devices are being hailed as the ‘new generation of electronic books’. They proudly tout themselves as sleek, compact, and easy to use. Not just for books, but you can also read newspapers on these tiny devices; a wonderful accomplishment for those who get as annoyed as I do at the people on trains who feel the need to stretch out their arms as they read their huge newspapers. The Sony Reader allows you to store up to 160 books; perfect for book lovers who long to carry all their favourite books around with them. Sony partnered up with Waterstones for the launch of this new electronic gadget, allowing its consumers to buy their ‘e-books’ directly from Waterstone’s website. Sony proudly reveals that with the use of an SD memory card, one can store thousands of books in a collection. Of course, such exciting technology is far from cheap. The Sony reader currently retails at Waterstone