Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I included all the dates in my post. 2008 was when they added support of epub to their devices, not when they actually switched the format of what they sold. They announced that they were going to be switching in August 2009. We even had a long thread discussing it on Mobileread.
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Spring 2008 to August 2009 was a whole year and more that Amazon was promoting a unified ecosystem. Hardware. Ebooks apps.
SONY?
They were talking up epub on the hardware while still trying to sell lrf in the bookstore.
They never said what they would do for customers of lrf books until after the switch. Who'd buy a format even Sony said had no future? And with DRM nobody had cracked? Not many, turned out. The finally got their store running in time for the conspiracy and the 4 hour price war.
The froze the store. For over a year.
And they froze their own market.
They osbourned their store at the worst possible time.
Now, it wasn't their fault that B&N stupidly destroyed the market for hardware-only vendors but if they hadn't killed their walled garden they would've had a chance once the rules changed. One of the advantages of proprietary formats is you control your own fate.
And Sony knew that!
Playstation is built on it.
They had the means to compete and threw it away.