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With all the fuss surrounding Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, Sony's rival has been somewhat left out in the cold. However, the company has now begun its fightback with a firmware upgrade that will untether the Reader from Sony's propriety format - meaning users will no longer be restricted to buying eBooks from Sony's store alone.

Whereas previously

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the Reader only supported Sony's Broadband eBooks (BBeB) format, RTF and unprotected PDFs, users will now also be able to read protected PDFs and the EPub format, which is currently finding favour among the major publishing houses such as Penguin, Simon & Schuster and HarperMedia.

Opening up the Reader will also help Sony take on the Kindle in terms of title selection. As it stands Sony's store offers around 45,000 books, significantly lower than Amazon's roster of 140,000 titles.

Quite whether the move will be enough to energise the turgid eBook market remains to be seen, with many consumers still put off by the prices of the readers and eBooks and the confusing array of formats.

For further analysis of the eBooks recent troubles click here.