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Originally Posted by WilliamG
It's an interesting read, but the Sony Reader is NOT the iPod of books. The iPod is an icon now. The Reader, will never be. Why? Because more people will listen to music than anyone will ever read.
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I question even this basic premise (it may be true in the U.S. and Europe with A LOT of people, but not everywhere). Also, remember that novels, which may be decreasing in sales, aren't the only things people read. If you add magazines and newspapers, for instance, I'd bet people spend more of those than on music. There's a market for you.
So if/when the Reader can support magazines and newspapers, it will have a larger global market (and profit base) than music has right now.
Based on the article, two things occur to me: One, the Reader may need a redesign to deal with some of the physical limitations/laments that users have; and Two, that color displays would add considerably to the variety and quality of available content (newspapers, magazines, manga/comics, etc).
What One and Two add up to is this: The present Reader could be a
Live Market Prototype, a testbed designed to perfect the
ultimate product, Sony Reader Mark II. (To make clear, I have no evidence that Sony is following this strategy... just that, if I were Sony, that's what I'd be doing.)
My final comment is this: It's a shame it doesn't support HTML... maybe it will in the future (or Mark II will!)... but at least it will support RTF, which I can convert my novels to with very little trouble. So even if I don't get the chance to sell my novels through the Connect store, I can still sell them in RTF for customers to self-load onto the Reader. That's cool.