Today, Sony officially launched the latest salvos in the increasingly intense e-book wars. Depending on your perspective, this was either a big deal, or a collection of incremental changes: new models, new supported formats, and cheaper e-books, but little that significantly differentiates these products from their predecessors. Still, the effort reveals that, despite the company's extensive cost-cutting measures, it's not giving up on the e-book market.

On the hardware front, Sony will be offering two new reader models by the end of August. The larger model, the Reader Touch Edition, aka the PRS-600, will retail for $299. This 6.9 x 4.8 inch device will keep the touchscreen of the PRS-700, but ditch its backlighting. The software will apparently be updated, allowing freehand note taking with the included stylus. It handles both Memory Stick and SD cards for expansion and file transfer.

The Reader Pocket edition (PRS-300) should fit in a relatively expansive pocket, as it's 6.2 x 4.2 inches. Part of the reason that it hasn't shrunk all that much from its larger sibling is the lack of a touchscreen, which forces Sony to allocate space to basic controls. Despite the smaller size, it will display the same number of pixels as the Touch Edition.

There's more news on the software front, where Sony is finally producing a Mac client of its library management software. In addition to Sony's DRMed e-book format, the software will handle the EPUB files used by Google's public domain books, as well as PDF, Word documents, and RTF text files. That's more formats than the Kindle, and Sony claims that its PDF capabilities include reflowing documents on the fly; PDFs on the Kindle are given a one-size-fits-all approach. Wireless access to the e-book store is still in real-soon-now territory, but Sony is matching Amazon on price for new releases and best sellers, which will all appear at $9.99.

All of this appears to be a nice incremental update, and Sony has provided a few differentiating features that will clearly appeal to audiences with specific needs. The push to add features and support additional formats—both Sony and Amazon have done these sorts of product releases within a year of their last one—shows that the e-book reader market is extremely competitive, even before the entry of Plastic Logic's device, planned for early next year. Even the most significant differentiator, wireless service, should vanish at some point in the future.

The downside of this is that the ability of any manufacturer to produce a truly novel feature, one that clearly sets apart one product from the rest, seems to be limited. Based on the most recent releases, device makers are focusing on trying to add anything that might provide a leg up on the competition, no matter how minor the feature. This cutthroat competition is all the more striking because it's not even clear how large the market for dedicated e-book (and e-newspaper) readers is. Barnes & Noble, for example, is betting that readers will simply access books on their other electronic gadgets.

In any case, the new releases show that Sony's not giving up on the dedicated hardware, and plans on fighting Amazon for a slice of whatever market exists. The key question, however, may be whether both companies can provide enough compelling features to ensure that an e-reader market flourishes.