RicDay on Publishing

There was a time when Sony understood the markets it was in. It made products consumers really wanted. It positioned itself on the high end of the mass market and was very successful. No more.

In the days when co-founder Akio Morita was running the business, Sony owned the high-end of the mass market for consumer televisions with its Trinitron models. They were rock-solid reliable, had better imaging than most of the mid- and low-end rubbish, and consumers wanted them.

The same applied to the Walkman product (initially sold as the Soundabout in the US), which Morita championed after the Sony board tried to kill it. The Walkman was a product Morita understood — the idea came up from the factory floor, the way a lot of Japanese consumer products did in the heyday of Japanese industry in the 60s and 70s.

Sony and Philips of the Netherlands collaborated on the creation of the (Red Book) compact disc standard, which changed the music business.

The eReader Mess

Sony today is not the Sony of Morita, Ohga, and other leaders. It is not the company most of us think of first when we think about consumer electronics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ebook space.

Sony had a first-to-market advantage with its early ebook reading devices. They were based on the e-ink technology which would soon be adopted by Amazon and many others and they used the then-new EPUB format.

I bought the Sony PRS-700 quite early in the game, in 2008. It used a touchscreen which reflected a lot but worked. The hardware was well-made with a solid feel to it. It required a special USB cable and Adobe Digital Editions on the desktop to move books to the device. I could shop online at the Sony Store, using bloated and eventually unstable software supplied by Sony.

Everyone I showed the Sony Reader to wanted one and by April of 2009 at least a dozen friends and acquaintances had bought a Sony Reader. But by mid 2009 I was seeing increasing problems with the Sony software, which I have described in earlier posts.

Sony has lost its advantage in the ebook space. While there are signs the company is still trying to innovate (a current model has a much better touch screen, for example), it has been overtaken by its competitors. Consumers who know anything about ebooks associate the Kindle brand with them and perhaps Kobo. Dedicated customers of Barnes & Noble know about the Nook.

Buying an ebook with a Kindle is instant gratification: just connect to the Amazon Kindle store with the Kindle, select the book, and if you have a one-click account, click once. The book will arrive on your Kindle via WiFi moments later. Kobo and the others are offering the same quick service. Sony is stuck with a dated and nasty business model.

GadgetReview says it all in their October 1st, 2010 review of the new PRS-350 reader from Sony:

Sony is feeding on scraps at the e-reader table, and their compact PRS-350 is not going to change anything about that.

and

the Sony Reader Store looks hopelessly malnourished when compared to the offerings of competitors, and the only way to upload books to the reader is through USB port and annoying Sony software.

The Sony model line is over priced in comparison with the competition, under-featured, and totally hamstrung by terrible software. The only conclusion one can draw is, the people running Sony today have lost contact with the consumer market.

I expect that there will soon be very few places selling Sony Reader devices, outside Sony’s own retail stores. Kindle, Kobo, and Nook reading devices increasingly own the dedicated ebook reader space. The iPad and other emerging tablet devices are the purchase of choice for those seeking a multifunction device.

And how long will the Sony Store survive? You can buy ebooks from the store and read them on a PC or Mac, but only if you are willing to download and install 100MB of that DRM-laden software I found to be utterly unstable on my computer. Or you could shop elsewhere.

Read the full GadgetReview article quoted above.