Sharp Enters e-Book Business

A great review of upcoming Sharp push into the e-Book biz with new platform and Galapagos branded devices http://bit.ly/9B5le9

See full article Via Tech-On:

Sharp Corp. of Japan will begin an electronic book (e-book) download service in December 2010, and open its own content store feeding two dedicated tablets to be released simultaneously. The distribution service is only the first step in a large-scale project being implemented by Sharp. From spring 2011, the two terminals will start handling a growing range of content including video, music, games and textbooks.

The new media distribution business will run on a new distribution system developed by Sharp, based on a business model that allows Sharp to collect handling fees for content sale directly from the content holders. Sharp says the fees will be in line with the market today, and plans to expand service overseas, especially to Europe and America, in the future.

The e-book distribution service will start off with about 30,000 titles, including newspapers, magazines and books. The service will support only the next-generation mobile document format (XMDF) file format developed by Sharp to start, but it will be upgraded in the future to handle other formats including portable document format (PDF), hypertext mark-up language (HTML), and electronic publishing (EPUB).