If you want to believe Sony CEO Howard Stringer, the
Sony Portable Reader is going to be a huge success. Here is the relevant excerpt of an
interview he gave to technology columnist Walt Mossberg during the
WSJ D conference last week:
Quote:
Mr. Mossberg: Let's talk about the Sony Reader, which is a new and quite different e-book device. ... This is not just a device. You have to pull off something sort of akin to iPod and iTunes with this, where you have a device people like, at a price they will pay, and very good software on the computer to handle it and then a good service with a lot of content where the DRM [digital rights management] isn't too intrusive.
Mr. Stringer: You're right, that's a lot of pieces to put [together], that sort of end-to-end model that Gates was saying no one wants, but everyone does, actually. I've put my name on this damn thing. I'm a reader. I know that's an odd phenomenon these days, but I carry books all around the world, so when I saw this I fell in love with this device. The fact that you can store 80 books on this and more on the memory stick, the fact that its battery life is seven-and-a-half thousand pages, which means about 25 books. ... The publishers love this ... Dan Brown [author of "The Da Vinci Code"] endorsed this at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Mr. Stringer: He was in love. ... I have to do a kind of Steve Jobs salesmanship job, which is a fairly intimidating thought. My colleagues in Japan don't believe I can make this work in the United States because they actually don't think Americans read. ... But I think the demand for this [is huge]. I get called every day about it.
Mr. Mossberg: There has to be a lot of content there.
Mr. Stringer: There's plenty of content. We've got thousands of books. I'm not worried about that. I'm really worried about -- can I create a business model where the demand is great enough to create the numbers? Part of Sony's problem is, in order to sell almost anything, you're talking about building a demand for millions of things, always millions, not thousands.
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Of course Sir Stringer forgot to address the other part of Sony's problem - the company's insistence on 'standards' which no one else either wants to or is able to use.
Thanks to Liviu_5 for the tip!