Any one remember the Sony Bookman launched in 1991? Yep, 1991. See attached photos. I was stupid enough to buy one in the early 1990s. It was actually a really good device for its time and it used the Sony MD (miniDisk) with one book per disk. The concept was a clamshell design with monochrome, non-backlit screen that was basically an MD player adapted to display text. The device was great, but the huge library of available books on MD never materialized. First you had to order book MDs through mail order catalogs (no internet stores back in the dark ages) or go to a Sony store. The Sony store in Austin never carried more than a dozen different books. The mail order catalog only listed a few dozen books. The device was discontinued almost immediately.

It was one of many cases where the Sony engineers showed great imagination and developed a bleeding edge product. But the Sony marketing and business execs did little more than soil their adult diapers in board room meetings and so Sony never exploited this new technology. Sony execs are still the same--not worth as much as the load in their adult diapers. They have some of the best engineers and designers in the world and yet the corporaation is apparently run by morons.

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