Sony Brings Its E-book Store To Europe

Five years after launching it elsewhere, Sony (NYSE: SNE) is finally ready to open up its electronic book store in Europe.

Reader Store first rolled out in North America back in 2006 and in Sony’s native Japan in 2010.

Now a UK launch is planned for October 2011, with Germany and Austria planned by year’s end and France, Italy and Spain early in 2012. Further new markets are also on the cards.

The launch dovetails with the WiFi-enabled new Reader e-reader Sony announced at IFA in Berlin, which has a touch-screen and pinch-zoom text resizing and is lighter than Kindle. And Reader Store will also be accessible on Sony’s new tablet devices, which have underwhelmed observers.

The UK store will have over 100,000 titles; newspapers including The Daily Mail (LSE: DMGT), The Guardian and The Observer and magazines including The New Statesman and The Spectator.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) had also taken a long time after U.S. launch to introduce Kindle and its Kindle store to other territories.

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