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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 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.
This outlet. Has the Sony reader for $50. And it's had them for months, perhaps even over a year now. They're so crap they're pullbacks.
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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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My PRS-650 was one of the few Sony products I've ever used that didn't suck.
Then again, I never installed the software that came with it -- only calibre.
The real problem is you cant just make decent hardware and expect it to sell. The same issue exists with the slew of Android tablets out there, sure there is decent hardware and an operating system but theres not much you can do with them beyond web browsing (which historically hasnt been that great, especially the flagship Nexus 7, maybe they fixed that in the 2013 version) as there is very little in the way of useful tablet applications for them so you get the crappy experience of up-scaled phone applications.
Even the Nexus 7 is pretty useless given the dropping prices of large screen Android smartphones, combine that with the lack of tablet-specific applications and all you have is a slightly larger phone that can't make phone calls. I am not saying there isnt a market for it but it has been conclusively proven that the market is very small indeed. Sony had the same problem, sure their device was cheap but nobody wants a useless device no matter how cheap it is.
Unfortunately that is pretty much an apt description of everything Sony has made in the past 2 decades or so, really slick hardware with crap software and frustrating incompatibilities. They either need to just do a clean sweep of their software division or else just become a hardware design consulting company.
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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.
Likewise I look at my Clie TH55 and see today's Mobile devices, 10 years ago. And where is Sony now?
Sony products fro the early 90s to the late 2000s had two defining qualities:
- they were loaded with proprietary cr*p. Sony suffered the worst case of NIH ever. They had to have their own everything, from music compression to memory cards. This cost them a bundle in engineering, wasted time reinventing the wheel, and made for subpar products because the customers had to buy expensive gadgets that wouldn't be any use with anything else or had to be transcoded or whatever.
- they were infected with DRM schemes. From the VHS experience they seem to have got the idea that they _had_ to have the content providers on board, plus for a while they had their own music and films studios. Again this made for subpar customer experience.
And also, like you said, their software was just bad.
The result of that is that they missed out on just about every category of electronic gizmo that hit the market in that time period. Phones, mp3 player, organizers, laptops, tablets, you name it.
With the image and brand recognition they had, they should have been Apple. The rest is history.
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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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!
No. They did what they always do, and tried to push a proprietary format (Minidisc and ATRAC) instead of embracing an established standard. With their music catalog, they could have *owned* the MP3 player market like they did with the original Walkman. (add to that their movie catalog and they could have killed the iPod touch before it was even born.)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
does sony discontinuing a done product line mean the end of a pioneering company?
Exactly. I've had friends with Sony readers and I wasted many days over the years trying to get those things to work right. The quality of the hardware was always good. It was the same, tired, mistake that Sony always did. Their software SUCKED to the point where using it was almost pointless.
The client-side software on the PC barely (if ever) worked right. USB conflicts all over the place. Their DRM-laden eBooks was monstrous to work with. I have zero sympathy for Sony in this area. When they tried to compete with the iPod, their ATRAC-format, and software also seriously sucked back then too.
Sony had their chance. They deserve to simply die and be buried. Another once-great company put out of its misery.
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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They sucked. Utterly sucked. Equation formatting was laughably bad. Footnoting was dismal. Diagrams/graphs/pictures were far too small to see and magnify worked poorly (and of course there was no color). Writing text notes was a pain, and bookmarking was far too slow compared to page flipping. PDFs didn't format/reflow/do much of anything right.
It's not all that much better today. I love my Kindle, but I read novels and the like on it. Professional reading is almost always paper text. I've done e-textbooks on an iPad which handles equations and diagrams better, but it's still clunky compared to paper.
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No. They did what they always do, and tried to push a proprietary format (Minidisc and ATRAC) instead of embracing an established standard.
MiniDisc wasn't the problem. It was a great replacement for cassettes (even if Sony and retailers initially made the mistake of pushing it as a competitor to the CD). Random access track playback, track names, high-fidelity recording on Walkman-sized devices, random access editing without a razor blade: MiniDisc OWNED tape in oh so many ways. The ATRAC format was a logical choice for MiniDisc since the format had to be writable (not just readable) by the sort of portable hardware available back when MiniDisc first came out.
One of the Sony's big problems was their embrace of copy protection and DRM and the philosophy behind it. And this appears to have started when they bought out the CBS/Columbia record and movie studio operations around the time of the DAT fight. Technology like the Triniton CRT and the Walkman were about adding value for customers, while DRM is always about subtracting it.
With MiniDisc, Sony did things like bringing out MiniDisc "recorders" that had no microphone or line in jacks, only the ability to "record" over a DRMed USB connection. I guess they thought these were competitors for MP3 players and iPods. It took a long time for high-capacity MiniDiscs to arrive and in the meantime, Sony tried to push low-bitrate recording modes that were not always the greatest for sound quality.
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).
Minidisc and ATRAC pre-date MP3 as a format (1992 v 1995), so of course they didn't use the MP3 standard. Sony released MP3 players in the 90s, and while the software did indeed suck, it wasn't because of DRM. It didn't allow you to copy from MP3 player to computer, but that's not really a thing people want to do.
Anyway, the idea that they could leverage their movie holdings counters the idea that using an established standard as a format would have helped them. If they have large holdings, the only way to leverage that would be to restrict these large holdings to a Sony-only format. Similarly, Sony owns the company that makes Uncharted, they makes games in a Sony-exclusive format. If they owned the company that made Uncharted, and then had them design games in some open gaming format that would work on any gaming system, that would not help Sony's hardware division.
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Not fair: e-books were the one thing they didn't fuck with. Everything was e-pub, whereas Amazon was pushing their own weird formats. Can easily get content from different sources onto a Sony reader.
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I don't think that's quite right. Sony did anticipate the direction things were going take, they just tried to control it too tightly and had an overinflated idea of their own power to steer things. I think the Sony Network Walkman predates the iPod. I had an NW-MS9 and I think in many ways it (and the earlier versions) were ahead of their time. Tiny, digital, sleek, even the name "Network" hints and some anticipation of a future of medialess distribution.
However they utterly ballsed up the execution. Partly on the software side (the associated software was an absolute dog which seemed to go out of it's way to make things painful) but mostly because they were trying to own the future with their MagicGate DRM (which they even seemed to be trying to sell as something exciting for the consumer, though it was responsible for much of the pain in using the software) and codec restrictions.
Sony saw the future, they just wanted to own it and in trying to do so produced something that served them more than it served the buyer.
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This is the reason not to buy eBooks. Bye-bye library collection. Bother.
They had to have their own everything, from music compression to memory cards.
I believe they even had their own non *HCI compliant USB controller for a very brief while as well. That thing NEVER worked properly on any operating system. Pointless stupid proprietaryness for shits and grins.
As for DRM it was their fault. They massively hobbled the minidisc with DRM and that inspired them to do all sorts of stupid shit like makeing it pointlessly limited, hobbling the few computer based drives.
Oh and anyone remember their idiotic DRM labelled POS Atrac players from the early 00's? Those things had some stupid all-in-one encryption-compression-uploading program which only worked on some point release of Windows 98.
Oh god they were awful.
And then there was the Sony rootkit debacle.
And the other-OS debacle.
And so on and so forth.
Sony is a company of two parts. The first is the hardware division which is frankly excellent. They consistently produce amazing stuff on a technical level of great quality. Then there's the part of the company which dispises their customers and believes that they should be punished and fucked over as much as possible. Anything those guys touches turns to utter shit (sort of like a shitty Midas touch).
Things that they don't, e.g. their CCDs, are great.
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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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The first iPods worked with everything that could mount an USB hard disk, because they nothing more than that!
No. The first ones were Mac only. And FireWire only. (And had less space than a Nomad and no wireless, and were thus 'lame'.)
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I quit buying Sony products when they started putting viruses on CDs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Huh? The Epub format was released in 2007, while the Mobi format was released in 2000, and the Mobipocket company was purchased by Amazon in 2005.
Hell, I was reading purchased eBooks in PDB format back in 2002, from ereader.com.