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Sony won Blu-ray by spending the better part of one billion dollars on a last minute deal hours ahead of CES 2008. It already had so much at stake with PS3: a gaming platform, a trojan horse into the TV entertainment hub, a vertical distribution for Columbia pictures and TV content.
With e-readers, there is much, much less on the table. Come now: buying books at Sony Style stores? or Amazon? or Barnes and Noble? Sony may have an edge on the device: they are a CE king. But they have much less clout on printed content. At some point, Amazon needs to address a "common platform" where it participates or even leads ... but it can continue to make a pitch for what it does really well in the meantime -- be a great source of books people want to read today, delivered economically and reliably as Amazon has for a decade in physical delivery.
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