Yesterday, Sony issued a press release regarding their plans to make their line of Sony ebook readers more widely available in Europe and Asia, including Japan, China, and Australia.
Here’s the key information from the press release:
In each country Sony intends to leverage its relationships with local retailers, publishers and distributors to introduce the Reader along with a host of local content to help ensure the best possible reading experience . . .
. . . Today, the Reader is available in eight countries across the world, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland. Sony’s Reader Store is currently available for users in the United States and Canada.
Sony will announce general availability, local pricing and pre-order dates for the Reader in Japan, China, Australia, Spain and Italy at a later date.
Unfortunately, there’s still no word on when Sony will make the PRS-900 Daily Edition available to markets outside the US. That should be one of their priorities. Even if they can’t get wireless providers on-board with the 3G, they should at least make a Wi-Fi model an option.
Does it mean Sony will improve their language support capabilities as well?
Currently, none of the Sony eReaders supports ePub in RTL languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic).
Supporting Japanese and Chinese sounds more complicated to me 😉
Definitely seems so, although I’m pretty sure they already support those characters if the font is embedded in the file.
They display the characters properly (if the font is embedded) but they does not respect the text direction (RTL) and therefore the text is not readable.
Thanks, Carmel. Good to know.