The e-reader market has been taking a hammering in the last couple of months after Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com started a price war.
That battle is having an effect on the competition as brands decide whether to jump in and keep up or fall by the wayside.
Sony is the latest to trim its pricing over its range of three readers available in the US.
At the budget end, the compact five-inch e-ink Reader Pocket Edition has dropped from $170 to $150. It features 440MB of useable storage, a battery capable of around 7000 page turns and supports EPUB, PDF and BBeB book formats.
Ratchet things up a notch and Sony’s Reader Touch Edition sees its price drop from $250 to $170, the largest price drop off the three. This six-inch e-ink model features 800×600-pixel resolution with 300MB of useable on-board memory plus expandable storage either via MemoryStick Duo or SD card up to 16GB.
The Touch Edition has MP3 and AAC audio playback capabilities as well as showing JPEG, PNG and BMP images. It also handles EPUB, PDF, BBeB formats along with RTF and Microsoft Word. Battery life is rated similarly to the Pocket Edition.
At the top-end, Sony’s only 3G-ready reader is the Reader Daily Edition. Its price has been trimmed from $350 to $300, which still makes it one of the more expensive models on the market.
The Daily Edition comes with a 7.1-inch e-ink display with 600×1024-pixel resolution. The battery here is rated at a very healthy 12,000 page turns and includes the same media support as the Touch Edition. The difference is the 3G support which includes HSPA, UMTS, Edge, and GPRS data services with two bands (850 and 1900 MHz). Sony says users get free 3G access within most of the US.
With Amazon.com taking pre-orders on its new 9.7-inch Kindle DX at $379, Sony looks like it will struggle to maintain market share for its Daily Edition at this price, particularly when both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are doing 3G models (albeit slightly smaller) for under $200.
Still, the e-reader price war is clearly a take-no-prisoners affair and you can be reasonably certain that there will be a number of brands fall by the way side when this war is over.