August 7, 2008
How Sony lost the battle of the e-book
My FT column this week is on the e-book rivalry between Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle:
Ever since Sony lost the battle between its Walkman music player and Apple’s iPod, it has been trying to strike back. This week, it paid $900m to take full control of Sony-BMG, its music joint venture with Bertelsmann.
Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, wants to make it as easy as possible to download or stream music and films to all of Sony’s electronics devices, from Bravia televisions to PlayStation 3 consoles.
Sir Howard, still smarting at how Apple integrated hardware, software and its iTunes music store far better than Sony, has another target in mind. He wants 90 per cent of Sony’s hardware devices to be networked, and even to be connected wirelessly, within two years.
In one small corner of Sony’s empire, however, it has just made the same mistake all over again. It has squandered an early lead in a new field because another company was better not just at inventing an electronic device but also at linking it to a wireless network and making it easy for consumers to use.
You can read the rest here and comment below.
eBooks are inferior because they are not in a form to be lent on, cannot be stored on a shelf for aeons, cannot be signed, cannot be displayed in the vestibule for a son or daughter to read, perish with their medium, cannot be annotated and cannot be post-it noted. Printing an average paperback costs only a few dollars so costs are not much lower either. eBooks may have a future in perishable publications by saving print and distribution costs, for instance in daily newspapers, but that would be a comment on how much trash many contain. Do they have a print function for a fine article or a pearl of wisdom? Are they just another TV screen, and black and white at that?
Posted by: tomansoc | August 7th, 2008 at 1:01 pm | Report this commentThere are some of us who love to read so much that we’d read just about anything under the sun. Unfortunately, not only do I not have room to store the all of the books under the sun in my apartment… I dont think I’d even want to. For us eBooks aren’t inferior.
I also have no problem when it comes to sharing. If I read a book and it’s an amazing read I send it as gifts to friends (did that even before I got my kindle).
If you’re an avid reader you’ll defintitely find ebooks to be equally as satisfying as paperbooks (maybe even a little more superior actually when you can spot someone reading a book in a coffeshop that you might want and instead of making note to pick it up next time you’re in the store you can buy it on the spot on your kindle).
Oh, and you can annotate…black and white is best for your eyes when reading… and the pitfalls of the ebook that you list (tomansoc) can be the said for library books as well.
Posted by: MoyJoy | August 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm | Report this commentYou could well be right. There is another pretty fundamental difference between Sony and Amazon (and Apple) - Amazon isn’t a hardware company. You talks about the size of the book and music markets, but Apple is making its revenues and certainly its profits on the sale of iPods etc not on iTunes. Presumably the opposite is the case for Amazon and the Kindle.
Posted by: Sue Sparks | August 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm | Report this commentYou seem to forget something: The USA is not the world market.
Posted by: silencer | August 7th, 2008 at 7:37 pm | Report this commentThe Kindle’s “advantage” of wireless connectivity is useless outside of the USA. It is built and designed for a market that is 1/20th the market Sony is reaching for.
The Sony reader is truly a device for the planet, and now reflows PDF’s automatically - something Kindle cannot do. Since PDF books are the defacto standard, I would say that you missed the real story here.
The Kindle has limited if almost zero growth potential outside of the USA, leaving 6 billion customers the cheaper (and non plastic) option of the Sony PRS-505. Mine just came yesterday.
I carefully considered both readers. I love Amazon.com and am a loyal customer, but the deciding factor for me was that the Sony reader is smaller and more convenient to carry around day to day. The Kindle’s wireless link, while undeniably cool, was not really that important to me since I can stock up on a few books at a time whenever I’m connected to the Internet on my laptop. It takes time to read through a book, so the notion that I might need to impulsively buy one directly from the reader did not offset the negative impact the wirelss feature has on battery life. I also travel overseas quite a lot, and this service would not work out of the U.S. I do wish that the Sony store had as much selection and the lower prices for new releases — for me, that was by far the biggest benefit that the Kindle had to offer. But compact, elegant design won in the end and I went with the Sony. Oh, and it was $100 cheaper too. By the way, I think that ebooks are a fantastic way to eliminate book clutter, and I love having a substantial library with me pretty much everywhere; it’s the MP3 player equivalent for books.
Posted by: Gadget Guy | August 7th, 2008 at 11:17 pm | Report this commentin reply to tomansoc. I dont think your making a valid argument. Claiming that e-books are inferioris liek saying e-documents are inferior. Humans dont act by logic. When the sony walkman came out everyone thought it would fail because everyone wanted ‘recorders’ not simply ‘players’ but once it clicked, it clicked. Its all a matter of trends and hitting the right spot. PDAs were never bug until blackberry made e-mail easy. iPods were not the first mp3 players but were a fashion statement more than anything else, E-books just need to hit the right button, whateva it is.
Posted by: umair usman | August 9th, 2008 at 4:53 am | Report this commentHas the writer ever used either of these devices? I have the Sony eReader and there was no rivalry for me - the Kindle was too big, tried to do too many things and looked hideous. As a UK customer, I can’t buy books from the Sony store (yet), but the advantages still outweighed that problem. Seriously. Unless you have the cash for the Iliad, Sony is the way to go.
Posted by: Eirian | August 11th, 2008 at 2:56 pm | Report this commentShame on me for not becoming an engineer or computer programmer. Having gone through a long period of frequent travel, I envisioned the e-book long before Sony did. I just kept waiting for Apple to get a clue and invent the I-book. The ability to either purchase a book on small memory card or down load it through a cable (or better WI-FI) will be incredible. From News Week, to War and Peace, to Harry Potter, the future WILL be downloadable reading material. The programs could easily be created to allow notes in the margins, cut and pasting to note pads, and for printing hard copies in whatever amounts you so choose. GOOD JOB Sony. But don’t loose the momentum. Soon Sony, nor any other competitor, will be alone. I am just waiting for the break out of an open platform, the large library of material (think I-tunes), and the right price point.
Posted by: C. Olis Parsons | September 7th, 2008 at 6:09 am | Report this comment