The Japanese electronics giant seems to have announced that from later this year all of the company’s digital books will be available to read with the EPub open standard format and, also, that they will also be scrapping their own anti-copying software in favour of technology offered by Abode.

The benefit of this decision means that electronic books purchased for the Sony Reader device will be also able to be read on a variety of similar devices which also use the more common EPub format.

EPub is an electronic book standard consisting of 3 file format standards with the file extension .epub. The format is a free to use ‘open standard’ application which became the official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in 2007.

The move seems to be prompted by Amazon’s continued dominance in the US with the Kindle and the realisation that there simply isn’t room in the market for a multitude of different reading formats.

It remains to be seen if or how Amazon will react but it’s widely believed they see the future of electronic books to be in their hands alone and will not be in any rush to follow suit. The company is keen for the Kindle format to be available on as many devices as possible and is at an advanced stage of developing the format so t can be used on third party devices such as the Palm Pre.

With rumours abound of a launch into the market by Apple, and a possible collaboration with Abode, it looks like there will be a battle for dominance over the electronic book market and, at this stage; it looks like Sony are conceding defeat?