Effect of Kindle on Sony's Content Offerings

[vivaldirules]

I am really starting to get irritated with Sony's laziness at adding new titles for the Reader. The raw numbers of Sony vs. Amazon are bad but can be partially dismissed because of the uncertainty in Amazon's titles (self-published titles, mutliple entries of the same title, etc.). But Sony has progressively slowed the addition of new titles in the past six months. They were adding well over 100 new titles a day and now they are crawling along by adding a few now and then.

I did a search today of dugbug's SciFi/Fantasy award winners: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...156#post236156 Of the 437 titles, Amazon had 109 of them (25.0%) while Sony had 73 of them (16.7%). There's no excuse for that. Sony should sell every title that Amazon sells. There's no reason for them not too except their own laziness.

I really like my Reader. It's a great device. But if I can't buy books for it because Sony is too lazy to offer them, I can only recommend to others who are looking to look elsewhere. The Sony Reader: if content availability is a concern to you then don't buy one.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I did a search today of dugbug's SciFi/Fantasy award winners: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...156#post236156 Of the 437 titles, Amazon had 109 of them (25.0%) while Sony had 73 of them (16.7%). There's no excuse for that. Sony should sell every title that Amazon sells. There's no reason for them not too except their own laziness.

It might be interesting to see how many Kindle titles are available in any other electronic format. It would also be interesting to know who actually prepared the Kindle ebook files. Was it the publisher, or Amazon?

For that matter, who creates the LRF versions Sony makes available?

Bear in mind that before Sony, Amazon, or anyone else can offer an ebook, it must exist.

Amazon has enormous clout with publishers. If Amazon wants an ebook version of a title to sell for the Kindle, and one doesn't already exist, they can probably convince the publisher to provide the electronic files they can use to produce one. Will Sony have the same success?

I question whether the disparity is Sony's laziness, or the uphill battle in getting publishers to let Sony offer ebook titles at all.
______
Dennis

[vivaldirules]

In the past two weeks Sony have added about 600 new titles (a 1.3% increase) and now have 48,608 ebooks for sale for the Readers with an average of 91 new ebooks per day added to their offerings since September. The greatest percentage increases in the past two weeks are in the categories of Politics and Government (4.6%) and Religion (3.6%).

In the same period Amazon have added about 10,000 new titles (a 6.2% increase) and now have about 167,622 ebooks for sale for the Kindle with an average of 274 new ebooks per day added to their offerings since November.

[pwalker8]

It's getting pretty hard to argue that the Kindle doesn't have more books available. The history category at Amazon has some 10,800 books while Sony has 4588 books. While some of Amazon's books are duplicates (multiple versions of the same book), I don't think that every book is in there twice.

[vivaldirules]

What are the real differences between Sony's 48,000 titles and Amazon's 168,000 titles? How many are duplicate entries? How many are self-published (and therefore perhaps of questionable value to some people)? Does one vendor really sell several times the number of titles than the other and that you really want to read? And what are the real price differences between the vendors?

It would be great to have some real statistics but it's difficult to get hard data that's more than anecdotal because there's no downloadable database that you could analyze. So today I chose a single topic (Baseball) where the collections at Sony and Amazon are fairly small. I then manually entered the data into a spreadsheet and took a look. The attached XLS has three tabs: Sony, Amazon, and Both. The columns are Title, Author, Price, Vendor, and Notes. On the "Both" tab, I've highlighted the titles that are available at both sites.

Here are some statistics and my conclusions:

- Sony have 65 titles listed in the category of Baseball. Amazon have 140. That's a ratio of about 2.15 to 1 compared to the 3.50 to 1 for the total number of ebooks they claim to have for sale in all categories.

- The Sony site lists 1 title that's not a book about baseball (it's clearly about football and was probably placed here by mistake - it's not listed under Football). Amazon has no books listed that aren't about baseball. In both cases, the books listed are truly all about baseball. Both vendors have some fiction titles for sale (e.g., Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game) but there's no obvious attempt to list books here just to fluff up the numbers.

- The Sony site lists no multiple entries for any single title in this category. The Amazon site lists two entries for 1 title - one in English and a second in Japanese (!). Some of these titles may be listed in other categories at one or the other site, but I did not investigate this.

- There are 46 baseball titles that both vendors sell. The Sony site lists 18 titles that aren't at Amazon. The Amazon site lists 94 titles that aren't at Sony.

- Of the 94 titles for sale at Amazon that aren't at Sony, it appears that roughly 10 are self-published titles. These are mostly low-priced ebooks (less than $2.00 each). A couple of these might be compilations of player stats, for example.

- Even ignoring the 10 self-published titles at Amazon, I scan the titles and authors of the 18 titles Sony have that Amazon don't and the remaining 84 that Amazon have that Sony don't and I would easily pick Amazon over Sony based just on selection. I'm not much of a baseball fan but even I recognize that there are a lot more interesting ebooks for the Kindle than for the Sony Reader. Yes, you can now read Adobe DE titles on the Sony PRS-505 (which you can't on a Kindle) and that you might be able to buy elsewhere but I don't like the format of those at all and won't be buying them until Sony fixes that on the Reader, if they ever do.

- The average price of the 46 titles that both vendors sell is $11.23 at Sony and $8.90 at Amazon. There are 2 books that Sony and Amazon sell for the same price. There are 44 titles which Amazon sell for less than Sony. There are 0 titles that Sony sell for less than Amazon. The largest price differences are for two titles that sell for $17.46 at Sony and for $9.99 at Amazon.

This is all pretty consistent with my previous attempts to compare these vendors based on a portion of my library and on recent Sci-Fi/Fantasy award winners. But the differences between the two vendors appear to be growing, at least in terms of available titles. If I was buying an ebook reader today, it would certainly be an Amazon Kindle and not a Sony Reader.

[Ak Mike]

Another thing I've noticed about the Sony store is that, when searching for non-fiction topics, a lot of the Sony books that come up as search results cannot really be meant as seriously offered for sale - their prices are bizarrely high, over $100 and sometimes over $200. I've not seen this at the Kindle store, but then, I have not done many similar searches there.

If this represents a significant slice of the Sony inventory, it means that the realistic number of Sony titles is much smaller even than the numbers given by vivaldirules.

[vivaldirules]

Welcome to MR, Ak Mike! You're right that there are some really high priced Science titles at Sony. Actually, in the Baseball collection, Sony doesn't have a title for more than $17.50. But Amazon has 10 titles for sale for higher prices than that and 3 three of them sell for between $60.00 and $85.56! They must be gems or something.

[daffy4u]

The highest priced Kindle book is $6232.00 saving me $1558.00. Books on Nuclear Energy are very expensive even when they don't come with an energy plant.

[jerryleejr]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

The highest priced Kindle book is $6232.00 saving me $1558.00. Books on Nuclear Energy are very expensive even when they don't some with an energy plant.

Well let me know how you like it!

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Ak Mike

Another thing I've noticed about the Sony store is that, when searching for non-fiction topics, a lot of the Sony books that come up as search results cannot really be meant as seriously offered for sale - their prices are bizarrely high, over $100 and sometimes over $200. I've not seen this at the Kindle store, but then, I have not done many similar searches there.

...

Actually, many of these are seriously offered for sale. Specialized or academic books, have a very limited market. However the people in that market, really want the book. I spent $50+ on a ebook about pre Iron age warfare in the Near East and have quite a few hardback books that are in the $100+ range.

For people in a narrow niche like this, ebooks can be a true god send since so many of these type books go out of print quite rapidly. The only downside is that illustrations, pictures and maps don't tend to show up very well in ebooks.

[pwalker8]

I just looked at the spreadsheets for the sf books. That's pretty significant. There are some classic sf books that are available for the Kindle and not Sony (Dorsai!, Witch World, Glory Road). I love my Sony but I'm probably going to buy a Kindle soon, just for the content.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Actually, many of these are seriously offered for sale. Specialized or academic books, have a very limited market. However the people in that market, really want the book. I spent $50+ on a ebook about pre Iron age warfare in the Near East and have quite a few hardback books that are in the $100+ range.

For people in a narrow niche like this, ebooks can be a true god send since so many of these type books go out of print quite rapidly. The only downside is that illustrations, pictures and maps don't tend to show up very well in ebooks.

This begs me to ask you something I hadn't considered before. Do you worry about the long-term survival of an ebook that you shelled out hundreds of dollars for? I'm thinking DRM and also just the lifetime of any digital format which I would guess would be on the order of years instead of many decades for a hardback. I understand the convenience but if it was me I think I would pause for a moment before pulling that trigger. Does it concern you at all?

[pwalker8]

I'm not particularly worried for a number of reasons. First, for the most part, I have confidence that the DRM will be either be defeated or a mechanism will be put into place to convert. Truly, I expect that within the next couple of years, we will see DRM go by wayside much like music DRM is slowly being phased out.

Of course, 90% if not more of the books that I have purchased are available without DRM on the darknet, so if sony does drop support and thumbs it's nose at customers by not providing a way to migrate to a different format, then I am covered for those books.

Also, if Sony pulls a stunt like that, I would expect that most publishers would at least provide copies of the books in a different format for a nominal fee, if only to avoid the bad press and lawsuits that would follow if they didn't. For that matter, it would be a smart PR move if Amazon offered Kindle format replacements for a nominal fee in such a circumstance.

Finally, if need be, I can always screen scrap the remaining books. The so called analog hole has always been the achilles heel of any DRM scheme. If it's viewable or listen able on a computer, then a copy can be made. It might not be convenient, but it's doable. You just pull the book up in the pc software, do a screen capture of the window and then run that through text recognition software.

[Ak Mike]

It may be that these very expensive and specialized books have a market, but it's quite different than the general book-purchasing public. Walk around a large B&N or Borders, and you will not see any of these books; but you will see thousands of non-fiction titles at more normal prices.

So the question then is, does the Sony store really have the 48,000 titles that vivaldirules counts, or is there really a small fraction of that number of books for the regular bookstore, along with a parallel professionals-only store of no interest to the general public?

[pwalker8]

Actually I see several highly priced specialized books at the two B&N that I go to. Most people simply don't notice them since they aren't topics or titles they are interesting in. Of course, it's not surprising to me that one would see these at the Sony store. I'll bet you will see the same books on the Amazon store also.

Certainly the Sony store only has a small fraction of the titles you will see in a regular bookstore since most books aren't available in any ebook format, much less lrx. I typically will go by the local B&N on Saturday morning to browse. For the most part, if I see a book I like, I'll market it down on my iPhone and then check to see if it's available in ebook format when I get home. I would say that my success rate is perhaps 25% at the most and that is in a genre (SF) that is one of the most popular with the ebook crowd.