Sony Reader ebooks go DRM-free in bid to kill Amazon Kindle

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The Sony Reader PRS-505 nabbed five stars in our review but it wasn’t perfect – pesky old DRM and the fact that it didn’t play nice with all the formats we like brought us down. Now Sony has announced that it’ll make all the titles in its ebook store available in the open source ePub format.

The move means that you’ll be able to read any of the books in Sony’s store on any ebook reader that supports the ePub format. Sony’s also ditching its heavy handed anti-piracy software. It’s opting instead for an Abode-created solution that simply prevents endless copying of books.

With the Sony Pocket and Touch ebook readers on the horizon, it’s good to know the books we’ll inevitably buy for them won’t be locked up on them for good. It’s also bound to shake the DRM-loving folk at Amazon, who have suffered terrible press since it remotely deleted George Orwell books from Kindles.

You tell us: what would it take for you to convert to ebooks? Tell us in the comments now.

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Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website. Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.