Farhad Manjoo has a nice “what-if” story up on Slate about what Sony can do to beat the Kindle. Sadly, what Manjoo is doing here is akin to helping a little old crazy lady across the street – at best his advice will be ignore and and worst he’ll be cursed out.
He basically writes:
Anyone looking to beat the Kindle, then, should look to the iPod: Study everything that Apple’s rivals did, and do the opposite.
Whoa, slow down there Zen Master. Sony had been spinning its wheels for half a decade. Its memorysticks, its UMDs, and its ATRAC files have been kept around in a wrong-headed effort to “define” the market the way it had defined hardware during the 1980s and 1990s and it has fallen so far that I doubt it even knows who the iPods rivals are let alone how to avoid their traps. The same goes for the ereader.
My thinking is this: the ereaders will sell. They’ve already sold about 400,000 of the first generation. People buy them because they have lots of PDFs they want to read and they live outside of the US. Those are the only reasons why they buy them. All Amazon has to do is start selling the Kindle outside of the US and it’s curtains. Sure there will be second tier readers, but I doubt Sony’s will be one of them. The second tier will be a cheap ebook for students that will soon replace the written word and will probably be based on an open-sourced hardware design.
In the end, Farhad means well. Sony had a good run but I wonder if a company with such a tin ear is listening to his advice, let alone understanding why it needs it.
I really thought the Daily edition and the new crop of ereaders were actually going to do some damage. But it is like the iPod in some sense. No matter what anyone else comes out with, even if its better than the iPod, most consumers already have the ipod ingrained into their brains. Its the same thing with the Kindle. http://ziggytek.com/
The first to offer one which is solar powered and comes with Wikipedia wins.
The reason that Sony doesn’t have a chance against the kindle is very simple.
Sony sells electronics. One sale and they won’t sell another item for two or three years.
Amazon sells books. One Kindle sale and then they get revenue for two or three years from the book sales.
Tell you the truth I’d say the first company to embrace Pixel QI’s LCD design will win.
ANd if they could get a Digitizer for these things and say a program like Windows Journal. I’d be gold. be able to Write in your own hand notes. and annotate PDF’s = winner in the Ebook market to me.
My vote any day is the Sony. They make a much better e-book reader. Who really needs to buy a book on the go anyway. I can load up what ever I want on the Sony and odds are I am not going to come close to finishing all the books on a trip of even a month over seas.
Perhaps y’all are not aware…
BBC News: Sony launches challenger to Kindle…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8221880.stm
Wireless & ability to “borrow” books from local library.
Due to be available in the USA, from December 2009.
The accompanying MAC OSX version software release product to the SONY eBook Reader is astonishingly buggy. At this point highly not recommended on 10.5.8 deployments. Noted interference with sleep functions, hanging processes, etc. Also, difficult to uninstall. Same issues are not evident on our Windows 7 machines.