Quote:
Originally Posted by Phogg
People got used to buying Sony readers knowing that book lists and collections would have alphabetic tabs to search through them quickly. The lack therof lost Sony's established grip (which Amazon and Nook had utterly failed to budge) on the heavy reader/collector market.
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That isn't a market. That's a niche, and it's a small one. E-readers have tended to catch my eye out in the wild--airports, public transportation, etc--and I've only ever seen two makes: the Kindle and the Nook. And frankly, having had the opportunity to talk to a number of people about their devices... they're not that knowledgeable about the e-reader market. It's entirely exposure-based, and what two readers are they exposed to? The Kindle, because everyone has heard of Amazon at this point, and the Nook, because customers see it when they go into Barnes & Noble.
Sony's site doesn't have that kind of draw online, and they aren't a featured presence in any store. In stores that actually carry a variety of readers, it tends to be the also-ran: you see people futzing with the Kindles and the Nooks, and the Sony is hanging out in the least prominent spot, looking forlorn and unwanted.
They don't have a market, because nothing about their product draws attention: poor online presence, poor in-store presence, and the lack of a popular bookstore tie-in. They're boned.
Incidentally, Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs recounted a rather interesting chapter in the early history of the iPod and iTunes, and made note of the fact that Sony was particularly acrimonious about it, given their music and hardware holdings, and so they tried to develop a similar hardware/online-music fusion... and utterly failed. Just couldn't do it.
Frankly, they haven't had a market-defining product since the Playstation. They should thank their lucky stars that that line is still popular.
(And incidentally, the T1 launched in October, and the two previous generations launched in August, so it's still a bit early yet to be clearing out the T1s...)