Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
Marketing: Amazon leveraged the fact that they were already the default online destination for book-buyers into a dominant position in eBook sales.
They took advantage of that status in conjunction with aggressive advertising and pricing to get themselves to the top of the heap. It's no surprise that they didn't open up the Kindle store to other devices until after they had gained dominance in the market.
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"Marketing" suggests that the Kindle was basically equivalent to other e-readers and simply used advertising gain market share. But that's clearly not the case, as the Kindle was, for most users, the better product.
Amazon initially recognized that people buying an e-reader really wanted more than hardware; they wanted an infrastructure to buy books on, too. And so when you got a Kindle, you not only got decent hardware, but you also got access to a much larger bookstore than Sony's, with cheaper prices, and an easier way to get the books on your Kindle. (Until the K3, all Kindles came with 3G).
Sony never seemed to be very serious about their store, and after the Kindle came out, it seemed almost like a joke.
I think it's significant in this context that the #2 reader used the same approach Amazon did (which owes much to Apple's iTunes system) and also handily trounced Sony.
I also think that Sony shot themselves the in the foot with their 300/600/900 series reader. It's an *e-reader*. Touch is nice and all, but don't add touch if it makes the screen *blurrier*...people bought the device to *read* on.