Quote:
Originally Posted by Hughdal
As an avid Sony Portable Reader user and a strong supporter of this forum and it's message I think we are all missing the signs coming out of Sony regarding the Reader. There is talk of Sony getting out of the retail (Connect) business. There is talk of Sony adopting a new format from Adobe. There has not been a software update in almost a year. There is talk of Borders not selling the Sony Reader. There is talk of poor sales. There is no move by Sony to expand the Reader to TROTW (The Rest of The World) which at last count has just passed 5 billion. What is not being discussed is that Sony may just decide to drop the reader, drop the Connect connection and run to hide behind the PS3 (big target - small hiding place).
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Actually, that has come up around here about every couple of weeks for the last few months, Hughdal.
And sure, when you put it all together
that way, it sounds pretty gloomy, but let me put it in a slightly different way, and see how that looks to you.
Yes Sony did close the Connect Store --
except the e-book part, they were very clear that it's staying open.
Sony's announcement that they were going to go with Digital Editions is a
good thing: it will replace the PDF reader on the PRS-500 (which so many dislike so strongly) and it adds a format that has a really good shot (in my humble opinion) of becoming a 'standard' e-book format. That's not something to be alarmed about in my estimation.
By my count, it's a little over 5 months since the firmware update in early February, so "almost a year" may be just a wee bit of an exaggeration.
In that time they've announced that they're going to add D.E. support, so that may have something to do with why there haven't been loads of updates to the firmware. Besides, excepting the battery bug (which they've only recently admitted exists) there's really not anything
functionally on the Reader that needs fixing, only stuff that we'd all
like to work differently. The battery bug is more of an annoyance than something that impairs the Reader's usability, though I
do wish they'd fix it already.
Sales have been
rumored to be poor, but nobody has any
figures that they're talking about, it's all speculation. All Sony has said on the matter is that the Readers have sold beyond what they expected -- a nicely ambiguous statement that everyone can interpret differently. It's really tough to have any sort of meaningful discussion of the point with so little actual information.
You didn't mention the 1000 Readers that sold from Tiger Direct for $99 each yesterday, which some folks were suggesting might mean that Sony is dumping the line/product/etc. However that was apparently a 4th of July special that Sony worked out with Tiger Direct, as TD is now listing the Reader back at it's more usual price. It may also have been an experiment on
Sony's part to test the response to the lower price point, who knows?
I also think that all the
other e-ink reading devices that are popping up in the market place are a good indicator that Sony was right to bet on this horse. I somehow doubt they're going to bail just as the race is getting started. I
hope they're not that stupid, anyway!
The move into the rest of the world has been pretty well discussed too: there are issues with book distribution rights, they don't have them in every country in the world, and they can't sell books where the don't have distribution rights. They seem to believe that the Reader's success is fundamentally dependent on the availability of books from the Connect Store (which they can't sell worldwide, until/unless they get the distribution rights worked out). I happen to disagree with them on the ConnStore dependency, but I can see their point.
Perhaps this will change when they get D.E. on-board and other outlets start offering D.E. formatted books -- who can tell?
We have seen pretty good evidence that somebody at Sony monitors this forum, they know what sort of user base they've got going, and they even seem to listen to some of the things we kick around here. That's a pretty tenuous channel, I know but there it is.
