Regardless, simultaneous release dates with new hardbacks, availability (eventually) of the entire Penguin back catalog and the planned September launch date of the initiative are all promising for the snow-balling ebook movement. Now, where's my Apple ebook reader, dammit? [Telegraph]

In the fine print that you "agree" to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you're not paying to own 'em, in spite of the use of the term "buy." Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn't take away your purchases. Still, it's a license you can't sell.

But is this claim legal? Our Columbia friends suggest that just because Sony or Amazon call it a license, that doesn't make it so. "That's a factual question determined by courts," say our legal brainiacs. "Even if a publisher calls it a license, if the transaction actually looks more like a sale, users will retain their right to resell the copy." Score one for the home team.

There's a kicker, though: If a court ruled with you on that front, you still can't sell reproductions of your copy, an illegal act tantamount to Xeroxing your Harry Potters. You'd have to sell the physical media where the "original" download is stored—a hard drive or the actual Kindle or Sony Reader. Our guess is that it only gets more complicated from here. What happens when the file itself resides only on some $20-per-month Google storage locker?

For more details, have a look at the original, surprisingly readable legal summary:

The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions By Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert

Many users are unhappy that e-book readers, such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, restrict the sharing, borrowing and transferring of e-books. While some argue that the "first sale" doctrine should allow users to transfer an e-book in the same manner as a hard-copy book, these contentious restrictions may be valid under current law.

The Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle

The Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are portable media devices designed to carry and display e-books and other electronic documents. Kindle has a mobile broadband function that allows users to browse online content and download e-books while on the go. Alternatively, the Sony Reader requires users to download and manage their library of e-books via a home computer.

The contentious characteristic of both products is that they bar users from sharing their e-books with other users. For example, Kindle's license agreement grants a "non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy...solely for your personal, non-commercial use." Consequently, Kindle users may "not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to...any third party." The Sony Reader has similarly restrictive language in its license, but does allow users to copy e-books to several other Readers as long as they are registered to the same account.

The First Sale Doctrine

Some users have argued that these license restrictions violate the "first sale" doctrine. Under the Copyright Act, the first sale doctrine allows the owner of a particular copy of a work to sell, lease or rent that copy to anyone they want at any price they choose. These rights only apply, however, to the particular copy that was purchased; any unauthorized reproduction or copying of that work constitutes copyright infringement. For instance, you can't give away photocopies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but you can auction your paperback on eBay when you're finished with it.

When it comes to digital works, however, two complications arise: first, consumers might only hold a license to the content, rather than all of the rights that come from a sale; second, without a traditional physical container for each purchased work, consumers may not practically be able to sell their "particular copy" at all.

License vs. Sale

The first sale doctrine only applies to the "owner" of a copy of a work, so end users who acquire content by license do not enjoy the right to resell their copies. Whether a transaction is a license or a sale is a factual question determined by courts—even if a publisher calls it a license, if the transaction actually looks more like a sale, users will retain their right to resell the copy. However, as more commercial transactions involve the transfer of digital content—particularly commercial software—courts have struggled to consistently make the distinction between license and sale. Software is increasingly transferred with highly restrictive licensing terms, but federal case law has not clearly determined whether these types of transfers are licenses or true sales.

Kindle and the Sony Reader are following this licensing trend and creating restrictive licenses that users must agree to upon using the product. If these agreements are found to be enforceable licenses, they could serve as the legal authority to limit users from selling or otherwise transferring the e-books they download.

Amazon vs. Sony

Both license schemes are equally restrictive, but each product limits use in a slightly different manner. Amazon Kindle's use license expressly limits the extent and use of both the device and the digital media. The Sony Reader's restrictions operate in two steps: a license to use the device and a second license to use the e-book library software (created by Sony). In both devices, users are not allowed to circumvent or alter the pre-installed software on the device.

For digital media, Kindle's agreement allows users one permanent copy. The Reader, on the other hand, allows one user to posses multiple copies as long as they are all registered to that user. Both regimes are equally restrictive on the distribution, copying, and sharing of purchased e-books (to other users).

The reason for the differences in these restrictions is a result of their technical characteristics. Amazon's wireless store requires the terms to be agreed on initially, while the Sony Reader's reliance on iTunes-like software allows a separate use agreement. In effect, both agreements accomplish the same level of restriction, but you have a little more leeway with the number of copies with the Sony Reader.

Hard Copies vs. Digital Copies

Another possible complication stems from the inherent difference between transferring an e-book and transferring a hard-copy book. The transfer of a hard-copy book is just that; the physical transfer of one copy. The transfer of an e-book, however, requires the digital recreation or copying of that e-book. Because the first sale doctrine allows transfers of only your particular copy, and not reproductions or recreations, a digital transfer of an e-book is probably impermissible. Thus, users of Kindle and the Sony Reader can only legally transmit works by selling the physical media on which they are stored—be that the e-book readers themselves or the users' hard drives.

While the restrictions on e-books may initially seem inconsistent with the rights granted for hard-copy books, these differences are the consequence of new digital products outgrowing traditional copyright doctrines. Such issues are currently being examined by legal scholars and industry insiders, but only time will tell whether this degree of control over digital media is acceptable to society.

Dimensions: 255.8mm (L) x 173.5mm (W) x 14.3mm (H)
Display: ePaper (E-ink technology) 10 inches, 825 x 1200 pixel
Storage: 64MB Nand Flash ,SD/MMC card (Support for 2GB)
Weight: 320g (includes battery)
Battery: Li-ION 950mAH
I/O: USB1.1
Format Support: PDF, DOC, WOLF, HTML,JPG, TXT, CHM, RAR, ZIP, Images ETC.
Operating System: WOLF LINUX OS
Hardware CPU: Samsung ARM9 200Mhz CPU

By comparison, the Amazon Kindle has a 6-inch diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display with 600 x 800 pixel resolution and 4-level grayscale, while the Sony Reader has the same size but with 8 levels of gray and 754 x 584 pixels. [MobileRead]

Still flexible, the display can recognize "optical" writing, though probably not quickly. An eyes-on report mentions that the refresh rate is under a second, which while probably fast enough for quick marks, is not what you want to be handwriting a letter on. But we just had our boobie doodles in mind anyway. [techon]

For seven days now, I have comfortably read in many lighting conditions with the Kindle and can safely say it has not been a strain of any kind. I'm a guy who stares at a laptop screen for hours on end, and that can suck. Reading E-Ink from either the Kindle or the Sony Reader is a vacation by comparison. My wife has also stolen it from me every chance she's had, and especially likes reading the New York Times on an airplane, something she says she wouldn't normally do because it's just too much paper. No complaints about readability, guys. I wish you doubters could experience it.

Side by side, fonts appear smoother on the Kindle than on the Reader, and the Kindle has a choice of six font sizes, as opposed to Reader's choice of three. Both let you bump font sizes up or down on the fly, a major convenience. The Reader has active screens—showing animated status indicators and so on—while Kindle screens are always static. If anything on the Kindle page changes, the whole screen does a full refresh.

The Sony has a dedicated music player and JPEG viewer; Amazon hasn't quite nailed that yet. However, the Kindle does have one thing the Reader doesn't have in this department: a speaker. It's not bad either, if you're mostly hoping to hear audiobooks and background music.Even though you can drag and drop files to the Reader, you can only do that with unprotected stuff like PDFs, MP3s and JPEGs. Kindle's drag-and-drop potential is even less, since you can only drag a certain subset of compatible files over to it.

USB disk folder appearance of Sony Reader:USB disk folder appearance of Amazon Kindle:There's no way to download books from Sony's store without using the special eBook Library software, which is cumbersome and works only with Windows PCs.

Using the eBook Library with the Reader, you can get certain views of content that you cannot get in any way with the Kindle, and you can even read books on your computer that are stored on the Reader (though I am not entirely sure why you'd want to do that). Here's a look at the eBook Library interface: This is not a true to-the-death Battlemodo, but it was an attempt to show you the differences between the two devices, beyond mere specs. I have to say, it is this Windows-only, iTunes-wannabe PC reliance that hurts the Sony Reader more than anything, especially because Sony Electronics will never admit to being as bad at software design as they are good at hardware design. The extra $100 for the Kindle means freedom from the PC—if at the same time it means a shackle to Amazon and its potentially limited file friendliness. When you talk to regular non-geeks, downloading books—and those all-important magazines and newspapers—directly to the device makes the most sense. [Sony Reader; Amazon Kindle]

Sony PRS-505 Reader: The Sony Reader is $100 less than the Kindle at $300, and it won't charge you to load PDFs on it (the Kindle will take a dime for every PDF you allow it to convert to its DRM'd format). It also won't charge you to read blogs or get your RSS feeds, something else the Kindle nickel and dimes you for. This is probably the Kindle's biggest opponent, and, to be honest, would be my choice if I actually wanted an eBook (which I don't).

Bookeen Cybook V3:The Cybook sits between the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle pricewise at $350. Like the other big two, you can load MP3s up on an SD card and rock out to your tunes while you read books on it. It also can handle RSS feeds for you, free of charge.

Fujitsu eBook Demo: This is only a demo so it isn't available for sale yet, but Fujitsu's eBook is notable for how light it is. Clocking in at a mere 177g, it's much lighter than the Sony Reader (255g without the soft cover) and the Amazon Kindle (292g), which makes a difference if you're gonna carry it around all day. If that's important to you, maybe it's worth waiting for this guy to appear.

Seiko eBook Reader: Oh, did I say the Fujitsu was light? Well, it is, but not compared with this beautiful Seiko Reader that comes in at a nearly-immune-from-the-effects-of-gravity 57g. It's also a mere 3mm thick, making it the thinnest, lightest, and slickest of the selection here today. In addition, it has a crazily-high 1200x1600 resolution on its 6.7-inch screen. This is clearly the sexiest of the bunch, but there are few details on it and my guess is we'll be waiting a while for it. Patience is a virtue.

LG Philips Flexible eBook: This conceptual eBook from LG Philips features one thing that no other eBook does: flexibility. Yep, that characteristic of paperback books that we're all so used to feels conspicuously missing from these technological updates to the medium, it's sure to make the transition from dead trees to synthetics a little easier. This is more an e-paper display than an eBook at the moment, what with its 14.1-inch form factor way bigger than you'd want an eBook, but it's an example of what we have to look forward to in the future.

So what conclusion can we draw from all these products? Well, it seems like there's a lot of research and work being done in the eBook, eInk, and ePaper fields at the moment, which should mean that newer, better, and cheaper products will be coming pretty frequently. That means you early adopters might feel stuck with the $400 Kindle in six months when another eBook comes out with a better screen, free RSS feeds and weighing half as much drops for the same price.

And if you're planning to use your eBook to import a bunch of your own documents and use it to read a lot of material downloaded from the web, the Kindle doesn't seem like a great option due to the charges for doing pretty much everything on it.

But if you just want something to read books on (presumably books you'll download from Amazon), the Kindle seems like a good, albeit an expensive, choice. Just know that your Kindle won't be the hottest eBook on the block for long.

The Sony Reader is one of those quirky products that attracted reviewers originally because it was unique. The E-Ink screen was very easy to read, in spite of a lack of back lighting. And the idea of an iPod/iTunes system for books made sense. Or did it? Books from the Connect store were terribly expensive, and there was too much pressure to own digital titles, rather than rent them out, like a for-pay library model. How does doubling the book capacity help with that?

I'd hate to pronounce the new Reader DOA. (Heck, it might never arrive, since the listing and photos were pulled from the retailer's site after the post went up.) But while it's nice to know Sony is trying to tweak the formula, I'm just not sure the formula itself is worth the chalk. [Wowio via Gadget Lab]

Plus, you get 50 bucks' worth of free e-books at Sony's iTunes-like store when you sign up. Such a dealio. Take a look at Brian's exclusive report and pics, tells the tale. Sign us up. – Charlie White

There is some unfortunate news that was learned from this Q&A: the Sony Reader will only be available in the U.S., and no, there still isn't a release date. Hit the link to learn everything and more about this highly anticipated device. – Travis Hudson

Sony Reader questions answered by Sony Reader Team [Mobileread]