Has Sony lost the e-book battle against Amazon?

[reeder]

Originally Posted by reeder

Amazon wins easily. Sony burned me too many times with their Reader and their overpriced, horribly formatted ebooks and lousy customer service that doesn't care about you once they have your money already. One cutomer rep even brazenly told me "If you don't like it, go get a damn Kindle." Well fine then! Screw them.

Amazon = excellent customer service, they'll even replace a Kindle totally(!), excellent low prices on ebooks, more ebook content by far, word search, integrated dictionary, wikipedia, internet access, you can make notes in the thing, and i could go on.

Screw Sony's Reader. The Amazon Kindle's got this market by the head now and it's only getting stronger. If I could, I would have bought a Kindle instead. Guess I'll have to wait until Kindle 2.0 comes out.

(This is coming from a owner of the Sony PRS 505 btw. I know people who have Kindles and we have swapped devices for a week. The winner is the Kindle all the way.)

I will be heard! Take that, Sony! I will not support you and your derision toward your customers anymore!

I'm giving my money to Amazon's Kindle and content. The higher price will pay for itself within a few ebook purchases.

Plus: REPLACEABLE BATTERY, BABY. Once the Sony Reader battery goes out, that's it. Screw that crap. Amazon wins again with their replaceable battery. Sony wants to be the iPod so bad but they won't last with their poor content availability, poor ebook formatting, high prices per book, no replaceable battery, horrible software that keeps crashing, rude customer service and other BS.

Jeff Bezos kicked your butt. And this hursts to say because Sony just took my money and kicked me aside. Well no more.

Amazon all the way. Just the helpful customer service alone makes me want to deal with them and their product more.

[Kingston]

I started a thread a while back along these lines which drew a lot of similar comment: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18521

Back then I only owned the Kindle. Now that I have the 505, it is obvious that it is better made and better designed than the Kindle.

Bottom line, however, is that Kindle is marketed by a bookseller and not just any bookseller, the largest bookseller and the one with the greatest popularity online.

So having an electronic reader closely tied and integrated to a bookseller gives Amazon a huge advantage which Sony can never, ever have.

Sony makes electronic devices, they have very little experience selling books, and none of the clout with publishers that Amazon has.

So when the smoke clears in a few years, I suspect the market will mature and Kindle will be a large part of that market.

As I discussed in the old thread, when a market matures and Sony has not dominated, or at least played a major part in it's genesis......they tend to pull out.

Bottom line is..Sony is in the business of making money. If the ebook market proves to be less than profitable they will pull out, history has shown this over and over. Nothing against Sony, just good business sense.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Perhaps the Kindle users will be the type that want to press a button, get a book over EVDO, and see the automatic charges on your credit card. No muss, no fuss.

My decision to buy the Kindle was driven mostly by features like book search, dictionary lookup and annotation. If Sony had those, I would've had one long before the Kindle came out. I was considering the Cybook because it at least had dictionary lookup. I was hoping they'd expand it to full content search eventually. Aside from adding Web & Wikipedia to search capabilities, the wireless thing was a big ho hum for me. Now that I have the Kindle and have experienced how nifty the store is, I think it's great but I would've bought the Kindle even if I had to download stuff to my computer like all the others. I'm a geek. I like to tinker. I'm certainly not afraid of the big bad USB cable. I'm sure the Kindle also appeals to those that are, but it's not necessarily the driving factor.

The reason the Whispernet download thing is so cool for me is the samples. When I hear about a book I might like, I click one button to send myself the sample. Later on when I feel like it, I give it a read. If I like it, I click on a link at the end and I have the rest of the book in seconds. It doesn't break the rhythm of the reading that much. I don't need to put down my cup of tea or dislodge the cat. It doesn't matter if I'm out at a cafe or on the train. The alternative to this would be buying books ahead of time. I know from experience that I'm not exactly the world's greatest at figuring out what I'm going to want to read a week from now. I have a lot of unread books because of this. I have probably paid for the Kindle in what I've saved not buying books I either didn't like enough to finish or never even got around to reading. I'm fickle. My fancy for a book often passed before I even opened it. Big waste of money and paper.

[MerLock]

I'm hoping the market is big enough for more than one e-ink Reader. Even though the Ipod dominates in the mp3 player market, there are still other companies out there selling their own players. I hope the same is true for electronic Readers.

I'm just disappointed that Sony did not market/promote their Reader as much as Amazon did with the Kindle since Sony did release earlier. I'm guessing that could also be because their isn't a huge slection of books to choose from on their store when it was launched and still even now.

I just picture most people researching the device and can immediately find more selection on the Amazon site for the Kindle than from the Sony store and many people are already familiar with Amazon's website. I know you can find more content for the Sony at other web bookstores but I just don't see many people going that extra length while doing the research. Amazon makes the user experience very easy by having everything on their site, not to mention the user exprience of purchasing a book through Whispernet as mentioned by Alisa in the post above.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by Alisa

I'm a geek. I like to tinker. I'm certainly not afraid of the big bad USB cable. I'm sure the Kindle also appeals to those that are, but it's not necessarily the driving factor. The reason the Whispernet download thing is so cool for me is the samples.

I wasn't out to hurt your geek cred - but I do think the Kindle is not primarily aimed at tinkerers. I do think the Kindle is aimed squarely at the mass "push a button" consumers, and I think it makes sense as a business model.

So, um, if the Iliad were cheaper, would you have bought that, or haven't you considered it at all? I know the featureset and potential make this geek drool.

[jakewastaken]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

I wasn't out to hurt your geek cred - but I do think the Kindle is not primarily aimed at tinkerers. I do think the Kindle is aimed squarely at the mass "push a button" consumers, and I think it makes sense as a business model.

So, um, if the Iliad were cheaper, would you have bought that, or haven't you considered it at all? I know the featureset and potential make this geek drool.

The Iliad is freakin huge in comparison though. I can actually fit the Sony reader in my cargo pockets.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by jakewastaken

The Iliad is freakin huge in comparison though. I can actually fit the Sony reader in my cargo pockets.

While I agree the form factor of the Iliad is a consideration for some (I would actually like a true A4-or-close-to-that screen), those are some mighty big cargo pants pockets

[jakewastaken]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

While I agree the form factor of the Iliad is a consideration for some (I would actually like a true A4-or-close-to-that screen), those are some mighty big cargo pants pockets

I'm a big guy, but you probably just wear tighter pants than I do. It's a close fit, but it definitely does fit.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

I wasn't out to hurt your geek cred - but I do think the Kindle is not primarily aimed at tinkerers. I do think the Kindle is aimed squarely at the mass "push a button" consumers, and I think it makes sense as a business model.

So, um, if the Iliad were cheaper, would you have bought that, or haven't you considered it at all? I know the featureset and potential make this geek drool.

The iLiad was really tempting but the slow boot time, poor battery life and size made it a little less appealing as a fiction reader. Complaints about reliability, battery life and the older screen made me decide to wait and see for a work reader. I'm not thrilled with the price but it would be worth it with the right features. I want something with a larger screen that works well for PDFs. I need to be able to read diagrams and tables easily. Search and annotation are a must. iLiad seems the best currently available but it's not quite there yet IMO. I'm chomping at the bit for the new 9.7" devices.

[carld]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

So, um, if the Iliad were cheaper, would you have bought that, or haven't you considered it at all? I know the featureset and potential make this geek drool.

I definitely would have at least considered it. The Iliad is a very cool device but the price was prohibitive.

[nekokami]

I bought my iLiad used at half-price right after the Sony Reader came out, from someone who wanted to switch. It has worked out very well for me, but I do understand the complaints about boot time and battery life. I like the open development environment, though, I actually prefer the screen size, and the stylus input is critical as I bought it in part to read and annotate journal articles for my graduate studies, and to take notes in class.

And to read books, of course.

If Sony's next version has some kind of wireless/cell connectivity AND they do a deal with Borders Online, they might catch up with the Kindle. Otherwise, I think anyone with similar features and a lower price point is going to eat their lunch. I'm quite curious to see how well Astak does (if they ever get their products out the door).

[big_stan]

I'm sorry to say (since I probably have one of the first 500's that were sold in the US) that Kindle is going to win this war. Why? Because Amazon's store is just great. It's very easy to find e-books, and trivial to download them to the reader. Sony's store/application is just terrible, and has been since day one.

The Sony reader might have better format format support, but honestly that's a non-issue for most non-technical people out there. The ability to click on the buy button on a web site and have the book just appear on the reader is totally ground breaking for most people. No playing around with applications on their PC (which may or may not work with whatever OS their using), no USB cables, etc.

Now I love my PRS-500 and will continue to use it for quite some time. But for me, there will be essentially no reason to stay with with Sony if I need a new reader. If long term customers like myself move to Amazon, why would a normal person buy a Sony in the first place?

BTW - I fully realize that most of my comments only make sense in the context of the US market at this time, but I think it's only a matter of time until we see a GSM/wifi version of the Kindle (maybe Kindle 2.0?), which will open it up to the entire world (just like the iPhone 2).

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by big_stan

until we see a GSM/wifi version of the Kindle (maybe Kindle 2.0?), which will open it up to the entire world (just like the iPhone 2).

You realise that in Japan and large swaths of Europe there are already better/higher-speed cellular networks than EVDO, right? I think it is not so much a network availability issue (except for the roaming stuff which is still a mess everywhere) as it is of differing copyright laws, messy international law, and publishing rights messes.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by =X=

So BOb I have a theory on that. My hypothesis is that the technically superior product/standard always loses. (Unless it's given out for free).

=X=

So, why isn't Linux winning?

BOb

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

So, why isn't Linux winning?

While I don't necessarily agree with the original hypothesis, by what are you measuring "winning"? Obviously, income/revenue is not a good indicator in a free product. But what about "running most of the WWW"? Does that work?

The desktop market, of course. But seriously, who wants to deal with consumers? All they do is complain