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Some devices you get and wonder why you ever wasted your money on them. Others are worth what you paid for them. A few are worth many times what you paid for them. For me the Sony Reader falls into this last group. I feel as though I have already gotten my money's worth from the Reader and everything else is a bonus.
While Sony HAD a history of sticking with a product (Betamax, minidisk) even if the market reaction was less than expected; we do not know what is in the minds of the new Sony executives. Parts of CONNECT not related to the Reader have already been closed which leads to the question, "Why save one part just to close it down a month later?" I think the answer is that they are not abandoning the Reader and used the Tiger Direct as an experiment to see how the market reacted to the $100 price point. The buzz generated here alone may have been worth more than the same amount of money spent in one of their print advertisements. If we assume a not unreasonable 100% retail markup and a now regular selling price of $300, Sony's return dropped from $150 to $50 per unit thus costing Sony only $100,000 for the whole thing. (All prices are in US currency.)
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