Usually it's only large scale consumer problems that get listened to by a large corporation. They are famous for being unresponsive to customer issues. Yet we have found today that Sony is listening to customers needs even before any actual complaint is filed with the company! Is Sony reinventing itself right before our very eyes? In the e-book world, Sony has certainly demonstrated a fresh new attitude.
Let's review what has happened. MobileRead members like Mobius and Lordvetinari2
had observed that some of the e-books at the Sony Connect online store were being priced too high - just under hardback prices even though the book was available as paperback. In most of these cases, the Connect store pricing had not reflected the paperback availability and so they had not lowered the corresponding e-book price.
At Mobius' urging, we
set up a thread yesterday afternoon to highlight the pricing anomalies, with the intent of sending it in to Sony with a plea for consideration. You really don't expect a company like Sony to be especially responsive to customers saying "please change your store prices"!
To our great amazement, we woke up today to find that in direct response to MobileRead's identification of some out of line prices at the Connect store, those e-books have already magically dropped in response to our input. Way to go Sony! Thanks go to Nathan and MelancholyTea for the discovery. And a big thanks to the publishers also, for being flexible enough to allow that to happen. It's the publishers who set the prices, but as we see today, they are apparently willing to work with Sony to get things right!
And let's remember that this is not the first sign that there is something different going on at Sony. They seem to actually care about their customers. For example, in advance of the Sony Reader rollout, they also offered to do a Q&A with the product team for MobileRead readers.
Additionally, for the first time in Sony's history, they also held an event for a select few in the blogosphere, providing personal product time with the Reader before it's release. To our surprise, the Reader product team was not only excited about their product, and wanting to share information with the web community, but they were genuinely interested in our thoughts and input.
We had previously
asked the question of whether Sony could return to the good 'ole days of the Walkman era. Obviously we undershot. With the positive response we are seeing to the Sony Reader product itself, and the way the company is demonstrating an interest in its customers concerns, maybe Sony is even reinventing itself into something better than it ever was. If this is their new way of doing business, we can surely look for great things from Sony in the future!