Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
#5 is not necessarily a good thing. Talk to folks who own a Clie.
The Clie line was Sony's entry in the PDA market, when PDAs were "must have devices" and Palm and Handsrping couldn't make thm fast enough. They ran Palm OS (with some annoying proprietary Sony tweaks), and a number of models were produced.
Sony killed the line and exited the market. The Clies were profitable, but not profitable enough. Sony management decided they could get a better return on their investment putting the funding elsewhere.
One of the concerns expressed here a while back was whether Sony would be in the ebook market long term, or whether the sales, revenues, and profits would be insufficient and they'd pull the plug. The problem is that Sony is a big outfit, and needs big numbers to make something worth doing. Management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to invest where it will get the best return. We don't know how well reader and ebook sales are doing, so we can't guess whether Sony will stick with it.
(The same comments apply to Amazon and the Kindle, but they are in a different position. They are a consumer oriented company, selling a variety of goods as a retailer. It was fairly easy for them to add ebooks to their line, since they already sold pbooks and had the established relationships with publishers. And they can leverage their content to provide Kindle sales. Prices on ebooks are generally cheaper at Amazon...if you have a Kindle. If either vendor decides the idea isn't working and to fold the operation, I'd call Sony more likely to do so.)
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What people FORGET is that Amazon has a KNOWN history of screwing people when it comes to eBooks. Amazon at one point sold eBooks. Amazon then decided to stop selling eBooks and everyone eBook library was emptied so if you needed to redownload due to updating the computer or what not, you were truly screwed. So Amazon has a big black mark against them as far as eBooks go. Way to go Amazon.