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Old 08-01-2010, 10:55 AM   #34
SensualPoet
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Posts: 2,302
Karma: 2607151
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Toronto
Device: Kobo Aura HD, Kindle Paperwhite, Asus ZenPad 3, Kobo Glo
In Canada, Sony operates SonyStyle retail stores and its e-readers, for practical purposes, are the only ones in the big box electronic stores. Sony showed up at book festivals in Toronto (and no doubt elsewhere) making a real effort to seed the market at least as far back as summer 2008 (or was that 2007?).

Kindles weren't sold to Canadian addresses until late Nov 2009. Sony took out full page colour ads in the "national" newspapers like The Globe and Mail in Dec 2009 (during the height of the selling season) singing the praises of Sony's e-readers (the PRS 50x, 30x and 60x have been sold here) right down to a line-by-line comparison chart. And then, they seem to have quit.

Kobo, sold and majority owned by Indigo book chain in Canada, launched on May 1, 2010 at $149 -- essentially half Sony's local price at the time; Kindle was still US$259 + shipping. Kobo's launch was a bit rocky: badly tested initial firmware and stock shortages. Kobo also took the step of distributing in Wal-mart. But still Sony did not respond. When Kindle dropped below $200, Sony reacted bringing the PRS 60x down from $299 to $249 and now $229 -- arguably at par with the Kindle 2 once US shipping is added.

And then Sony's e-book store implementation was bungled. You have to install software on your computer just to see the price of a title -- or to determine if the title is even sold in Canada. My impression is that the lion's share of commercial titles are NOT sold here. (Kobo took the other route: you can only see stuff sold locally. Amazon blocks viewing too but its not hard to see non-Canadian titles.) It's exasperating: the impression builds quickly that Sony isn't interested in selling e-books in Canada.

The long and the short of it is that Sony had a strong head start but didn't have the taste to pursue the market. You simply cannot sit on the sidelines in evolving consumer markets like home electronics and entertainment and expect to remain viable. This was Sony's game to lose ... and barring some extraordinary new developments, they have.
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