Quote:
Originally Posted by mgrunk
And, I'm just curious as to why Sony is in the book selling business? Is it really profitable? I love the Reader, just not the software / store. I understand the Kindle model - Amazon was the go to place for books, so now they have a reader and the content together. But, I guess I don't exactly understand the connection between Sony and e-books.
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Sony is a consumer electronics manufacturer. They saw a market for a dedicated ebook reader, and produced one. But an ebook reader is useless without books to read, so they had to develop a storefront where you could purchase them, and acquire books you could buy to read on it.
Sony's future plans, according the the President of the Reader division are to be extremely open. Support for ePub as a format in one move in that direction, and wifi support is planned, but not tied to a single provider as is the Kindle's Whispernet service. We'll see how it works out.
Is the ebook selling business profitable for Sony? I have no idea. It wouldn't surprise me if they had longer term plans of getting out of ebook sales once the pieces were in place to let users buy titles they could read on their Sony Reader elsewhere. But meanwhile, Sony
has to be in the ebook retailing business, simply so that there
are books you can read on the Sony Reader.
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Dennis