Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherCat
While probably hurried along by the other rationalisations going on in their empire, I suspect Sony have realised these things and those are the reasons for little recent development and exiting the to become increasingly niche E Ink reader market. It is something they are doing too late and that may be the only criticism of them. The market's writing was on the wall back when T1s were still on the shelves.
|
I don't think so. E-readers were always going to be a niche market simply because they only appeal to the 10-15% of people who read more than a couple of books a year.
What killed Sony were e-books readers with integrated bookstores; that this was a problem for Sony was obvious 5 years ago. Sony had the e-book market pretty much to itself for a couple of years, but despite Sony's first-mover advantage, Amazon quickly took 90% of the market because its reader made it easy to buy and read books. That this is the case is obvious from what happened to B&N - they took 30% of the market within the first year or year and a half of entering it. Again, because they had a reader integrated with a comprehensive bookstore.
Sony did a couple of smart things, like switching to e-pub and opening their own bookstore - but they still couldn't compete with actual bookstore companies. Particularly when those bookstore companies did not have to make much profit on their readers because they could rely on increased book sales. Sony was basically in the position of a razor company that didn't sell blades.
[/quote]
Last time I made mention of such things some E Ink fans got a little angry; perhaps such reactions are just another symptom of how niche the market is becoming.[/QUOTE]
The fact that people disagree with you isn't evidence that you are right.