10-05-2008, 05:02 AM | #61 | |
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To use your example, London taxis (which I'm sure everyone's seen on TV, if not in person) are made by a (relatively) small company called "Manganese Bronze" (http://www.manganese.com). They produce a specialist product for a specialist market (the average London taxi has a lifetime of about 30 years, and is designed for that purpose). It's something that no "mainstream" car manufacturer could possibly compete at. |
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10-05-2008, 09:16 AM | #62 | |
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Certainly not in a bookshop! In the same way that I didn't buy my mp3 player or my stereo system from a record shop or my TV from a DVD store. I'll buy an electronic gadget from a shop that specialises in and understands electronic gadgets. It's what almost everyone else does and I see no reason why they would suddenly decide to change in the case of ebooks. Are there people who would prefer the safety of someone else loading their books (or their music tracks)? Of course. Are there enough of them prepared to pay the premium for housing and staffing the service? I doubt it. Dedicated bookshops in the UK are dying anyway. This will be one more nail in their coffin. |
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10-05-2008, 09:34 AM | #63 | ||||
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I'm not sure what sort of push Sony can provide to other vendors. Quote:
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______ Dennis |
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10-05-2008, 09:41 AM | #64 | |
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But yes, big companies need big markets. Sales that will make Bookeen happy would be a miserable failure for Sony. ______ Dennis |
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10-05-2008, 09:58 AM | #65 |
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I like the idea of a kiosk in a bookstore to download e-books. I find browsing in bookstores more satisfying than browsing on Amazon. It's easier/quicker to see something that I hadn't previously heard of that might interest me. Sometimes I go to Borders or B&N, see some books that look interesting, and then go online to see if they are available as e-books.
Other times I may see an online listing for an e-book from an author that I'm unfamiliar with that might be interesting. I may go to the public library or a bookstore and look at the paper version: Do the first two pages hold my attention? I may pick a random page in the middle of the book and see if it still seems interesting. (If it's supposed to be a mystery, but the random page gives me a fairly explicit sex scene, it goes back on the shelf and gets crossed off my list because that's not what I'm looking for. Or if I'm looking for a cozy mystery and the random page has a CSI-type description of the body...) If I could buy a book as an e-book while in the store, instead of going home to buy it, that would be good. It would be convenient for me as a consumer, and, depending on how the companies set it up, it might mean that some of my money would go to the store where I decided to buy the book. Currently I can spend an hour in Borders but they don't get any of my money because I'm going to buy the book as an e-book if possible. |
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10-05-2008, 10:04 AM | #66 | ||||
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Part of the whole point of buying from a shop rather than ordering on line is to see and touch the device before purchase. But whether the shop "understands" the gear they sell is another matter. It might be better where you are, but over here, I've largely given up expecting the sales personnel to actually know anything about the kit they sell. Electronics retailing is brutally competitive and based on price. Shops pay the minimum they can for staff, which makes actual expertise unlikely. Quote:
But note that Sony is partnering with brick-and-mortar retailers, not just bookstores. They have a deal with Borders, who is a book and music retail chain, but they are also partnered with Target, with is a general interest discount department store, with a broad range of offerings. Partnering with bookstores makes sense to me because the target market is readers, and bookstores are a likely place to find them. Ultimately, that sort of effort is intended to prime the pump. Unless Sony successfully enforces price discipline among retailers, so that everyone charges the $399 MSRP, users interested will buy from the cheapest supplier. So they might see and decide to buy a reader based on an experience in a bookstore, but actually make the purchase elsewhere. Fine by Sony - a sale is a sale. And what will really sell the device won't be Sony promotion or retailer's efforts - it will be word of mouth from folks who bought and are happy with one. Sony will want to generate that word of mouth. Quote:
______ Dennis |
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10-05-2008, 10:11 AM | #67 | |
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Will their price be higher than you might be charged on line? Possibly. Will it be enough higher to outweigh the convenience of browsing and doing paper and ebook purchases all at once and in the same place? Hopefully not. ______ Dennis |
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10-05-2008, 10:16 AM | #68 | |
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10-05-2008, 10:38 AM | #69 |
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I personally like reading Science Fiction which is not the sort of book you find in a lot of retailers though Borders and Waterstones generally have a reasonable selection. What there is in London is a specialist book store that sells all sci-fi and on the odd occaisions that I get down there I usually spend several hours browsing and end up with a large credit card bill at the end.
I stopped buying paper books a while ago because I ran out of space to store the books I was buying as I generally like to re-read them a number of times there is very few I dispose of. Which is why I now have an ereader. Not the Sony as it wasn't available when I bought the Iliad. But in this context it doesn't matter. What does frustrate me with all the online book stores is actually getting to books I might like. Whilst it is easy to jump straight to a book if you know the title or a favourite author it isn't easy to replicate the browsing experience online. When I get chance to drop in on the specialist or any other large bookstore I spend ages looking at the books not the authors. I generally find a book cover or title will catch my interest and I'll pick it up to read the synopsis and/or dip into a few pages to see if it is something I might like. Not something that is easy to do online. I was looking on the Mobipocket site last night for example and it became painful when it displays 10 books per page and wanting to browse through only 3500 essentially became impossible. What it means is that I now tend to stick to the authors I know which is a pity because browsing the bookstore what what made them my favourite authors in the first place. So I agree with the people that are suggesting it would be a good idea for bookstores to be able to sell both how ever it is done. I'd be happy to 'reward' the retailer by buying the electronic version when I'd browsed the paper version even with a small premium as I feel I'd waste less money on books I found I didn't like but couldn't checkout because they were on the web. |
10-05-2008, 12:53 PM | #70 |
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Wow, great interview.
Looks like Sony has decided to put reading as an important pillar for their media business AND they learned from their mistakes with mp3/iPod. To reach tipping point: 1. Competitive pricing. Make the other Sony division aware of the opportunities: Give the readers away with every Vaio notebook/PC purchase. Isn't that a much better packaging deal? You take a $250 hit but I'm sure you make it up through ---> 1a. SOFTWARE. This is the achilles heel of sony. You don't need fancy redesign. The PS3 has a nice clean store interface. Borrow and implement. Minor: * Working with ALL publishers (book publishers don't want to be like the record companies with iTunes where they are forced because of necessity. Be a viable alternative for those publishers that will eventually rebel against Amazon's draconian business model) * Expand on touchscreen technology (the page flip is genius. Don't be complacent with touchscreen! - imitate apple's ) * Ignore feature creep |
10-05-2008, 02:50 PM | #71 |
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I can't imagine why the brick-and-mortar stores would partner with Sony unless some POS feature where in the works. I hope it happens as I would hate to see bookstores go the same way as the large record chains. I will occasionally still purchase at the brick-and-mortar stores just because I want to do my part to keep them in business given I do enjoy the experience there.
POS and wireless purchasing, increased content and discounted pricing (even if its through a club), would provide compelling reasons to switch to Sony. (And I love my Kindle) |
10-05-2008, 04:18 PM | #72 |
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Dennis:
Nice reporting, and SUPER to hear that you'll be doing some follow-up. I'd like to flog three ideas that you may wish to raise with the Sony folks.
Good luck following up with Sony. I'm waiting with bated breath to hear what you learn. Xenophon |
10-05-2008, 04:22 PM | #73 |
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10-05-2008, 04:23 PM | #74 |
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Copied from the "Hey Sony" thread in the PRS-700 area of the forums...
While I'm thinking about it, there's also a cheap cheap way to provide support for "convenient access to large numbers of eBooks" that many advanced users have wanted. This is the key bit: Give us a hook either in the .lrf format or the Epub format that lets us refer to another file on the same device. All that's needed is the ability to let the 1-10 buttons (on the 500 and 505) or a stylus push (on the 700) open that remote file just as though we were at the main menu. That hook alone would be enough for a 3rd party--probably an open-source programmer--to write a program that scans the current contents of the Reader and writes an index document. That document could provide whatever view they like of those contents: By author, by title, by tag, by series, by collection, by phase-of-the-moon, by cost of the eBook... whatever! Sony could look at the modalities the community builds, and build-in the best of them in future firmware. Or just let the community build it for you! Either way, everybody wins. Xenophon P.S. If anyone at Mobileread has good contacts at Sony, please pass these ideas on to them! It would be so easy for them to get useful leverage from the open-source community. And, they'd look like friendly good-guys instead of "big bad faceless corporation." What's not to like? Last edited by Xenophon; 10-05-2008 at 04:24 PM. Reason: noted source of this post. |
10-05-2008, 04:25 PM | #75 |
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Read his message again. He pointed the the post in another thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30061 ______ Dennis |
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