RicDay on Publishing

I wrote my last post comparing my Sony 700 with my iPad a few weeks ago but didn’t get around to posting it until this past week. Various annoying health issues got in the way. Since that post was written, my patience with the Sony has finally ended.

For the third time this year, my Sony software froze while I was trying to sync new books to the reader. Yet again, the freeze was bad enough that it brought down my computer and resulted in the Reader being erased.

My patience with Sony has reached an end. Sony’s “Reader Library” is a miserable piece of unstable, unreliable software. Google “sony reader library problems” and you get over a quarter-million hits. MobileRead has some good forum threads discussing how to fix problems with the software (generally involving uninstalling the software via Windows Control Panel and then dumpster diving in your primary drive to locate and delete a mess of hidden files which Sony’s installer put there but doesn’t remove. Then you get to reinstall everything, download all your ebooks, and pray it all works.

This is not acceptable. Sony may have been able to get away with this junk software during the “early adopter” phase of ebook reading, but it won’t fly as ebooks move into the mainstream and consumers buying reader hardware are no longer geeks and hackers.

It used to be that Sony was a brand of choice in this house. We had Sony Trinitron TVs, Sony A/V gear, a Viao laptop, Clie PDA… Today, not so much. Our computers are from HP, Acer, Apple and others. Audio and video gear is now “anything but Sony” and the only Sony device still in regular use is an ICF-2001D HF/VHF radio receiver I purchased in the 1980s in Japan, when Sony was still making high quality products.

Out of curiosity, I checked with my local Sony store to see if they knew of a way to resolve all the crashes. They didn’t. Only one guy in the shop even knew what I was talking about. He said he thought the 700 would be out of warranty and offered me a discount coupon with which I could buy more ebooks in the Sony store. I declined.

So, goodbye Sony, you have lost not one customer, but an entire family of gadget lovers. If I do buy another e-ink reader, it will not be one that has a Sony brand, or that requires a special USB cable and software.