John Dvorak at
PC Magazine has written the question that many of us have been asking ourselves. "Will Sony ever be Sony again?" Those of us awaiting the Sony Reader are even more interested in the answer to that question, and wonder if their upcoming e-ink reader might be a new "Walkman-like" revolution for the e-book world.
Many of us fondly remember how we used to go out of our way to find Sony equipment. Sony hardware had always been solid and was nice to look at. We got exceptional battery life in the old Walkman cassette players. Our trinitronTVs and stereo components seemed to last forever and provide exceptional quality. But then the world changed. We moved from strictly hardware products to a world of formats and software. It was no longer just about hardware, and Sony stumbled.
I still have quite a bit of Sony minidisc hardware. Ooops. Betamax players are probably only in museums these days, but nobody ever questioned the hardware. The glory days of Walkman devices ended with the mp3 revolution because Sony wasn't willing to support the most common standards. Instead, they went with a closed and less-popular music format, and it hurt sales. Apple and others stole the market that Sony had dominated.
How about storage standards? Another nightmare. Proprietary formats all over again. There's Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro and Universal Media Disc. If not for the success of Sony cameras the Clie PalmOS pda line, I don't think anyone would have wanted those media sticks. But the hardware products were great, so consumers were flexible. Kill the Clie line? We were wounded by the move and the quick withdrawal of developer support, but the devices were so good that we still use them, and remember them fondly. Provide less than stellar support? No problem, the gadgets are solid so we probably don't need great support.
The proprietary and control wars even extended to things like the Sony DVD burner I bought. I already had a CD burner in another slot with some CD burning software. I installed the Sony DVD burner which came with it's own Nero burning software. Then one day I got a rude surprise. I tried to burn a CD, and I couldn't do it any more. Nero gave me a message saying that it can only burn to the one Sony drive it's now tied to! There may be a good business reason for that, and I'm sure Sony got a great deal on the Nero bundle. But it really frustrated me. I found a great free CD burning alternative, but it didn't make me happy. Who would have thought that Sony's control-oriented way of doing business would have reached all the way to my DVD burner? I regressed to the point of avoiding the Sony brand as much as I had previously preferred it.
Dvorak says, "The latest fiasco is the recent revelation that Sony's Blu-ray player for the PC will not have the ability to play HD movies on the PC. This is to protect the interests of the movie makers somehow. Are they kidding us?" We even have rumors of Sony trying to prevent sales of used PSP3 games. (Don't know if that was just a rumor or if it was confirmed.) And we top it all off with the infamous rootkit fiasco.
So the question is a natural one. After such a proud and wonderful history of great hardware and market development, can they regain their former glory?
As we consider this question, I think we need to remember a few things:
* Sony still makes some great hardware
* Sony appears to have plenty of motivation to ease up on the proprietary lock-down, assuming they want to succeed with future products. A few extra sales of proprietary storage cards is probably not going to be their primary goal in uncertain times ahead.
* Sony is one of the largest content owners, and like most content owners they want to leverage that value as effectively as possible, and are quite scared of the potential loss due to illegal passing of copies.
* In the midst of all the turmoil, Sony produces some really great Clie pdas. If the Sony Reader product is anything like the Clie pdas, we will most likely be absolutely delighted.
Okay, so we are e-book fans, anxiously awaiting the Sony Reader. What are we to think? Is this the beginning of the revitalized Sony, and the start of another Walkman-like product category? Will Sony be the star of e-book and content readers? Or will we live through one more generation of nightmarish format lockdowns?
I think that we already have the answer from the preliminary glimpses of the specs, and supported by the Sony Q&A
published recently on the MobileRead wiki. This is going to be a device that is a user-friendly compromise between openness and devastatingly closed formats. We will get the best of both worlds.
Sure, there are those that will immediately say that the online Sony Connect store is a step backwards because it uses DRM, and that the Reader is too closed because it uses the BBeB e-book format.
But I think Sony is showing it's new colors by putting out a device that is a real stretch for them. We are seeing something from Sony that a few years ago we probably wouldn't have believed. Specifically, we give them kudos for some of the most critical choices in the product design:
* SD card compatibility, and
* Native standard format support (e.g. txt, rtf and pdf)
I'm not sure, but this may be the first Sony product to allow not just Memory Sticks, but also standard SD cards. I, for one, already have more than 12gig of SD cards, so that's good news for me. It's like reducing the price of the Sony Reader by more than $100 dollars because I don't have to buy the memory sticks! Well done, Sony!
And with regard to the e-book formats, we see that txt, rtf and pdf are supported, along with other formats like the most common picture formats and mp3.
For those who hate products that have a completely closed and barely usable nature, the Sony Reader is a breath of fresh air. You can even use it with any platform that allows you to write to an SD card... Mac, Linux or whatever.
Combine Sony's knack for great hardware, and their new approach to increased openness in this product, and it just builds the excitement.
But as I did say, it's a compromise, a balance. And it comes into play when you talk about the Sony Connect store. It provides a very important service if this product is to succeed like we hope it will, and especially if it's going to penetrate the general consumer market. Few mainstream book readers are going to buy the device just because it's got a great screen and supports standard formats. We geeks consider that to be sufficient, but not "real people."
The Sony online store will be the analogue to iTunes. We can all complain about the restrictions and DRM associated with iTunes, but you can't argue about it's success. The Sony online store is going to be the source for modern popular e-books, and is critical to the success of the Sony Reader. It will use DRM because publishers require it. And it's not likely to support other DRM'd formats out the gate. So yes, books will be in the BBeB format. But does that really matter very much what format an encrypted book is in if you can't read it on any other device anyway? Until there's a common and universal DRM, it just doesn't matter. More important is how well it ends up working on the device.
So back to the original question - Will Sony ever be Sony again? I don't know. We see some signs of change. And we continue to see some great hardware. The Sony Reader has broken loose of the old mentality, and provides a level of openness that could propel Sony forward to recapture the glory days. (Yes, I know that full openness connotes more than what we see with the Sony Reader, but you know what I mean... SD, rtf, txt, pdf, etc.) Or it might be just one bright star in a fading sky of Sony products. Either way, for the e-book world, it's a big step. It reminds you in a way of Neil Armstrong... "One small step for Sony. One giant leap for e-books."