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Sony Tosses the Sony Reader On the Scrap Heap
Nate the greatest (2261802) writes Sony has decided to follow up closing its ebook stores in the U.S. and Europe by getting out of the consumer ebook reader market entirely. (Yes, Sony was still making ereaders.) The current model (the Sony Reader PRS-T3) will be sold until stock runs out, and Sony won't be releasing a new model. This is a sad end for what used to be a pioneering company. This gadget maker might not have made the first ebook reader but it was the first to use the paper-like E-ink screen. Having launched the Sony Librie in 2004, Sony literally invented the modern ebook reader and it then went on to release the only 7" models to grace the market as well as the first ereader to combine a touchscreen and frontlight (the Sony Reader PRS-700). Unfortunately Sony couldn't come up with software or an ebook retail site which matched their hardware genius, so even though Sony released amazing hardware it had been losing ground to Amazon, B&N, and other retailers ever since the Kindle launched in 2007.
they made really nice ones, at least as far as screen. I'm guessing they can't compete with the heavily subsidized Amazon Kindles though...
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The Sony Reader has been available at my grocery outlet for $50 for ages now. Nobody buys them.
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They still have the Sony DPT-S1, a large format reader intended for the legal and other professional markets. Costly as heck though.
It's a pity they're exiting the business. I much preferred the Sony devices to the Kindle both for the build quality and for its flexibility about formats, which is a must if you provide most of your own reading material instead of purchasing it through Amazon or the Sony ebook store. The remaining alternatives to the Kindle (Kobo and various janky Chinese and Russian devices) routinely fall short in one or the other. For example, the Kobo doesn't have PDF reflow.
My PRS-505 was great, it was a nice metal case, and it survived in my house where 3 Kindles met a cracked screen fate. Then its battery died and it is $30 for a new one.
But I could see from day one that the library that Sony was offering was pretty much an irrelevancy. I am not sure that a single book they ever offered (not that I looked more than once or twice) caught my interest. I long thought that Sony should have gone enterprise with a very large screen (close to 8 1/2 x 11 as possible) for reading legal documents, documentation, and basically the size that every PDF is aimed at. Then they could have charged quite a bit of cash per unit and banked on the Sony name to give it respectability. So here comes a paperwhite in my future as nothing beats sitting in the sun near the ocean reading a good book.
No, though Sony could have pulled it out of the fire by partnering with a more respected content vendor, instead of trying to roll their own.
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Sad indeed. Sony should have learned something from their console business. It isn't so much the console as the games, it isn't so much the ereader as the ebooks. Now it seems their smartphone business is also going dodo.
However I'm curious about this part of your post: "The remaining alternatives to the Kindle (Kobo and various janky Chinese and Russian devices) routinely fall short". Does Russia really manufacture anything besides spyware, rockets, and killing machines?
For reference, here's what Obama said about Russia's manufacturing capability: "http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/03/us-ukraine-crisis-obama-idUSKBN0G30Q920140803"
These devices cry out to be made by casino and found in ever gas station for $5.
The Kindle with the keyboard pretty much perfected the device. It'd be nice if they got color figured out but I don't think anyone wants any more out of these devices. ok ok, put a solar cell on the back or something so you never have to charge it.
I'm kind of sad to see these devices fall off the market, though I can't say I didn't see it coming. They closed their "Sony Reader Store" for ebooks on the 20th of March, and sent another email detailing how to switch to Kobo. I've had a PRS-T1 for years now, and I love it. It's got a super nice feature where you could long-press a word you don't know and it would show you its meaning on its internal dictionary, or you could try searching google and wikipedia for it (if you were connected to wifi). It's so handy that when I switch back to regular books after a couple sessions with my ereader, I find myself trying to look up words in regular books by putting my finger on them. With the wifi off (or set to standby), the device supposedly will go for a month of regular (read: three or four hours daily) use. Never tested it, but boy it was nice, especially in an era of charge-nightly smartphones.
By far the best feature was that my PRS-T1 seems to be perfectly sized for my hand. I can hold it in my left hand and swipe the screen (to change pages) with my thumb, comfortably. Combined with the fact that it only weighs a couple of ounces, and it's actually possible to do extremely comfortable one-handed reading. I should go plug in the thing. And find more books for it. And read more.
Sigh.
You should turn signatures off.
Some of the Chinese ones aren't so "janky". I've seen Chinese-made ebook readers and tablets that were pretty darn nice, especially for the money.
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I liked my PRS-500. I thought it was a decent device, with so-so software. I didn't use it much after the first month or so. Then I got a Kindle. It more than doubled my daily reading and I still carry it always with me, several years later. In retrospect, I realized that I liked the PRS-500 just because it had the first good display I had seen for reading, but the software implementation, both on the device and the PC/store part were the bare minimum to make an "ebook reader" type device. I saw that some PRS-500/505 users gave it a little more life with Calibre later on, but that was not thanks to Sony. So I don't know about "hardware genius", was it perhaps before serious competitors started coming with devices which were at least on-par hardware-wise but had some brilliant ideas and software behind them?
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you get an iPad mini. Even Amazon figured this angle out. So this is not really surprising.
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I thought minidisc was the bees knees. Then the Clie. Now the Sony E-reader bites the dust. I need to find a different brand :(
Not sure now, but a few years ago the Sony reader had less restrictions than most (if that's what you're implying) - since it was able to read multiple formats, and no DRM requirements, i made it my choice, and we have 3 of them (different generations) in the house now. Will miss future iterations!
I'm asking more about what happens to DRM'd content that was purchased from Sony's ebook store now that Sony is pulling out (e.g. authorization servers).
Sony's strong push for DRM on everything from VHS to DAT to DVD to BluRay to Memory Stick has made me a Sony hater forever. They have lobbied for every industry restriction on fair use they can, and their campaign donations have funded congressional campaigns to advance their anti-fair-use agenda. I stopped buying their products in the 1990s, and I dropped my last aged Sony appliance off at the recycle center just a few weekends ago (a VCR that had been cluttering up the basement.) I can easily survive the rest of my days without Sony products, but I probably won't ever get my missing rights back.
So it's kind of surprising to me to learn that their e-reader wasn't as crippled as their other devices; but then again it could have been completely DRM-free, and it would still have been too little, too late.
John
does sony discontinuing a done product line mean the end of a pioneering company?
The biggest mistakes Sony made, was not to take advantage of the educational market. There are many places that are moving from physical text books to electronic versions, Sony should have gotten in early with places like California to provide equipment for the students to access their books, but with the encumbrance created by Sony, and no large retailers in place they lost market share.
Sony tries too hard to be completely in charge of every tiny aspect of their products, even when they lack the expertise to actually accomplish it.
They could have partnered with Amazon or B&N right from the beginning, and they would have been a part of something big. But instead they have a tiny part of nothing, all to themselves.
This is what happens when you don't share your toys Sony. Everyone eventually decides to get up and go play somewhere else.
In the 80's Sony was the gold standard for anything electronic. By the 90's they started living off their name and selling poorly made crap at a premium price. By the 2000's that started catching up to them.
In the 2010's they have become irrelevant.
Sony is soon to follow Radio Shack into history.
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I have a PRS-T1. I've never bought anything from Sony's store (it only existed in the UK for a bit over two years, compared with the eight or so in the US!). To my knowledge, the device supports ADEPT only, and once the content is decrypted once it is forever accessible on that device unless you revoke it (there is no online checking). So, uh, at least content already readable will remain as such on devices already authorised.
Also note that ADEPT has long been broken (it's got a good cryptographic basis, but there's almost no obfuscation in the system, so it's pretty useless as DRM), so it's /really not difficult/ to break content out.
Quickly Googling makes it sound like customers had their accounts transferred over to Kobo (thereby losing no content), unless they opted out (and I haven't looked closely to see what happened in that case).
I have the Sony PRS-T2 and it was really good for its time. However, Sony really fluffed PRS-T3 by not having a front light.
However, I think rather than Sony's hardware, it was the software that was better, esp for pdf in this generation. Kobo hardware was better - the aura and aura hd are one step ahead of kindles in hardware but one step behind everyone else.
Finally Sony was the only one with actual buttons. I was really hoping Sony would bring a new reader with frontlight and page turn buttons.
The real money to be made is in selling books and media rather than hardware. So, makes sense Sony bowed out because they aren't in the business of selling books.
You are as surprised as i was - it came as a shock to me that it was one of the least DRM'd readers out there!
Well, that's just it. They are withdrawing from the consumer market and sticking with the way overpriced professional market. And besides, their real money is in heavy industry. This entertainment stuff is chump change.
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... put the PS4 designers in charge of all their product lines. And maybe the ones doing the mobile phones, which aren't bad for cheap Androids. And fire all the rest.
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Look at that thing. It's smart, stylish, with a convenient touch screen interface and comes in a range of colours, and a recognised brand. It should do at least as well as the other ebook readers at the same price.
There's somethign really really wrong in Sony that the company is failing to address. Without their video games division I'd be surprised if the company remained afloat at all.
I'm asking more about what happens to DRM'd content that was purchased from Sony's ebook store now that Sony is pulling out (e.g. authorization servers).
Buyers were given the option of transferring existing purchases to the Kobo store back in March.
There was plenty of informational emails and warning reminders up until the eventual closure of the the Sony ebook store.
I guess if they didn't transfer over the books are now gone. The purchases I had transferred over just fine.
I was actually thinking it would be some long convoluted process to transfer, but it was a fairly simple process which was detailed in the emails.
This is the reason not to buy eBooks. Bye-bye library collection. Bother.
It's simply that hw manufacturer cannot compete vs subsidized hardware.
Build quality might be subjective, but Sony's readers are also so much less restrictive that Kindle's in terms of features/formats.
Get Calibre, strip the DRM from all your Sony content, done.
Note that that's what I did when I had a -505. Stripped the DRM from everything I bought, converted it to ePub format, and used it in that format.
Now that my 505 has gone away, I use a Nook, and still strip the DRM with Calibre so I can load unencrypted ePubs....
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Perhaps I have the dates wrong, but I was under the impression that Sony launched their first eInk reader in September 2006, two months after the iRex iLiad was launched (July 2006).
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SONY is like Sears or Atari. Just one long stream of failure after failure until they run out of things to sell off. Then they're done as anything other than a motion picture distributor.
1 - will there be cheap sales of Sony e-readers now?
2 - If so, what can you do with a PRS T-3 without the sony store? Can you root it? Can you side-load content?
The Boox is very good with PDFs and can even do CBR format.
The device was great, but no one really buys a Kindle for the device. They buy it for convenience and content. The Sony ebook store had a terrible selection. Worse, you had to buy it on the computer and transfer it to your device. Nirvana is achieved when you can pick up your ereader, decide you want a book, and can complete the selection and sale immediately. That's why Amazon was willing to eat the cost of the cell subscriptions, because it meant people could complete a purchase when they wanted, not when it was logistically feasible. That's become easier now with more ubiquitous wifi, but Amazon won on content and ease of availability.
I still own a PRS-505 and it's a wonderful device, especially paired with Calibre, but it's used almost exclusively to lend to people while I used my Kindle Paperwhite.
They're still working 20 years behind everyone else, caught in a love for industrial and UI (as opposed to UX) design.
They don't get the "ecosystem" concept. In fact, they actively fight it while everyone else is trying to build it.
Everyone else has known for a decade at least that every product is part of a service.
Sony is still busy thinking that every service is part of a product.
Others: The product is one of our service's features/facets.
Sony: The service is one of our product's features/facets.
So their devices are technically great, but too often they come narrowly bound to half-assed services that have only seen enough investment to allow the product to ship with the basic claim that it's functional. As a result, you can't actually practically use their products for nearly as much or nearly as well as competing products. The content isn't there. The accessories aren't there. The third parties aren't there. The fellow users interacting aren't there. Other devices may be technically inferior, but that have a large ecosystem of content, enthusiasts, third-party developers, accessories, etc. behind them.
While everybody else is practically begging the world, "Please, community! Embrace our product and take it in organically emerging directions!," Sony is busy saying "Get lost, community! We're in control here; stop trying to take this in non-approved directions!"
Other tech companies would kill to get a community going. Sony would kill anyone that claims to be a part of a "community" around their product.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
so spare me the politics.
It was "Why is Sony failing?"
The reason that sony is failing is that you can buy (or, in your terms, "rent") more content, more accessories, more apps, more of everything, and do so more conveniently, from competitors products. The device itself is not the failing; it is that the usefulness of the device is diminished by the relative lack of things to do with it, and the lack of ways to do so conveniently.
It matters not at all what you think of the big picture to answer the posed question; it is simply that whatever Amazon offers, Sony offers *less* of it—not in the device hardware, but in everything that surrounds the device hardware, in the ways that the device hardware can be used. Sony's hardware is thus less useful, not for reasons relating to hardware or UI design, but for reasons relating to business relationships, customer-facing opportunity structure, and so on.
The politics of DRM and so on is an important discussion to have in our political life, but the fact that Amazon offers DRMed books has little to do with why Sony is failing (Sony, of course, offered the same—just fewer of them, with fewer ways to get them on the device, and fewer accessories to use with it).
Yes, the community is the product—it is also the product that the community consumes. Yes, publishers and manufacturers skim value off the top of that circular transaction. That is, as you point out, the business model.
And what I am saying is that that is the *dominant* business model right now, and that Sony sucked at it in comparison to Amazon or even to Barnes and Noble.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The Sony Reader PRS-T1 is pretty great, easily rooted and runs Android. Every further successive version Sony locked the device down further and further - with minimal hardware upgrades... Thus the T1 is the better choice: cheaper and more functional than the T2 or T3.
Note the Nook is also easily rooted, though not quite as necessary now as the Nook HD has Google Play pre-installed -- even on the refurb/pre-owned models on Amazon.
I own the T1 and prefer this to the T2/T3 due to the buttons being more comfortable to press. I don't know why anyone would think that buttons reminiscent of a web browser (and 3D with raised/sunken parts which make them uncomfortable to press frequently) was a good design idea.... though I still don't know why they thought adding that metal panel on the T1 (like a Bravia TV?) but at least it didn't affect using the T1.
As far as I know only LG makes the plastic display and only the Russian vendor Wexler has a consumer device built around it - the "FlexOne", which looks nice but it's nowhere near as large as the 9.7 inch Boox.
So IMHO the answer is to keep treating the larger displays like glass. While I would like the big Sony display I can just turn my Boox sideways and look at half of a page at a time.