Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Sony was another player that had everything in place to succeed and threw it all away.
They had a head start, a decent-for-the-times ebookstore, and solid hardware. More, they had a six month window when Kindle sold out that they had the market pretty much all to themselves and they blew it by wasting a year in the transition to epub from lrf. Which they completed just in time for Nook and the conspiracy to wreck their entire business plan by moving the market to walled gardens.
B&N didn't just shoot themselves in the foot; they shot pretty much everybody around them except Apple and Amazon.
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Actually, the switch by Sony from LRF/LRX to epub was more of a last gasp effort than a turning point. Amazon already had most of the market by that point. Sony's problem is that while they had a superior reader (I thought the PRS-500 was much better than the kindle-1) and a good selection of books (the equal of Amazon for a while), the only way to purchase and get ebooks on the sony eReader was to use their horrific software program which looked rather like is was written by some summer intern. People sometimes forget that Calibre got it's start in life as a way to get books on to the PRS-500 since Sony's software only worked on Windows. In addition, they basically sat still and did nothing for almost a year when the kindle first hit the market.
The way I normally bought ebooks from Sony (and I bought almost 200) was to use the web site to find the books that I wanted to buy, then buy them via the sony software program. Sony eventually improved their software program and released a version for the Mac, but it was too little too late by that point. Amazon had already had shot past them and had control of the market. Amazon's hardware wasn't as good, but they had a superior selection of ebooks and a much, much easier way to buy and put ebooks on the kindle.
Basic Sony timeline
Sept 2006 - PRS-500
Oct 2007 - PRS-505 (note Amazon introduced the Kindle in Nov. 2007)
July 2008 - Sony adds support for epub.
Aug 2009 - PRS-300,600, added mac software
July 2010 - switch store from LRX to epub.
May 2014 - Sony closes it's store and moves customers to Kobo.