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Months late, stuck with big investment in BBeB proprietary format, Sony unleashes PR campaign
July 28, 2006 | 10:51 pm
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By David Rothman
The e-book business is enough of a laughingstock. Annual e-book sales for Planet Earth are probably well under $100 million, a speck of the tens of billions spent on paper books.
So actually I’m rooting for Sony to succeed with the Sony Reader. You remember, don’t you? The E Ink gadget that was supposed to come out in the spring?
But can public relations substitute for action? Bennett Kleinberg of Goodman Media International, a Sony PR contractor, has written Boing Boing that Sony will answer readers’ question. Same deal goes for MobileRead; and ditto for Make. Here’s to communications! But if Sony really cares about consumers and e-book publishers, why does it still intend to:
1. Popularize BBeB, an inferior proprietary format that will inevitably give way to an XMLish standard, as even Bill McCoy, a blogger at Adobe, a Sony partner, admits. Sony is paying for conversion of books into its format. We’re not talking about merit here, just raw corporate power. Sony actually would have been better off going with one of the existing proprietary formats and using the saved money to trim the cost of the Reader—expected to sell for several hundred. At least readers would then have a choice of many more books than the mere 10,000 that the Sony will debut with. Talk about an impoverished selection! Ten thousand books is a fraction of the number in typical public library branches. And unlike the libraries’ books, they’re not free—with discounts far, far less than you’d expect of e-books.
2. Tie in hardware with a particular format. Last I knew—Bennett is welcome to tell me if things have changed—BBeB won’t work on Pocket PCs or Palms. Maybe later, but not now. Ask public librarians about the grief that the Gemstar approach caused through the hardware-format connection. Consumers and librarians alike would be fools to trust Sony on the durability of BBeB. Sony couldn’t even keep the Clie PDA line alive in North America. Unless the profits are there, Sony will walk away from BBeB. It’s a for-profit tech company, not Mother Teresa.
Ads still misleading about PDF–despite a complaint to Sony
In addition, I’d welcome Sony’s being a little more helpful in its advertising about the fact that the Reader will not display encrypted books in PDF format. Even a tech writer for BusinessWeek misunderstood, and I suspect that some consumers will as well. Granted, Sony does mention PDF in the “More than just books” section of a Web page, but I still don’t see a disclaimer. Consumers will hazily remember “PDF” but not the context. I complained about this to Bennett months ago and, to my knowledge, never got a reply back from Sony. The present ads show how deaf the company has been.
TeleRead isn’t a Bennett- or Sony-blessed blog, but if you have any questions for Sony, just post ‘em below, and I’ll be glad to point him to them. Be polite to Bennett and Sony, but don’t be afraid to ask tough questions or offer your suggestions as to how the company can be responsive in action, not just in PR. For good measure, I’ll also share the pointer with a nice Sony guy involved with the Reader. Hey, nothing against Bennett or the other fellow–they’re merely doing their jobs, just as I am in alerting you about the gotchas associated with the Reader.
Meanwhile remember that grubby details like formats do matter. Writing in from Ghana, David Ajao says of e-books in a cell phone context: The important thing would be to have a common format, so things would be much easier for authors and readers alike.” How true! I doubt that the current BBeB will run on a wide variety mobile phones–in fact, probably on none. Like Draconian DRM, proprietary formats will be toxic to struggling publishers in the Third World.
The irony is that Sony, too, will suffer with its present approach. Some months ago Sony thought it could be the iPod of e-books, but now Apple, maker of the real iPod, appears to be on the cusp of coming out with an iPod intended for digital reading. Sir Howard and friends would do well to phase out BBeB and go for OpenReader or even plain OEBPS. Look, nonproprietary standards would be a positive way to distinguish the would-be iPod for e-books from the real one that Apple apparently will give us.
Reminder: I’m among the ringleaders of OpenReader.
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Comments:
“But if Sony really cares about consumers and e-book publishers, why does it still intend to. . .”
I think you answered your own question David:
“It’s a for-profit tech company, not Mother Teresa.”
I am still excited about this thing. In addition to the 10,000 ebooks you mentioned (which may be less than a full public library, but is still an awful lot of popular titles to make available), I’m planning on using this to read public domain works, of which there are already plenty available.
And the asking price, while not cheap, is still way, way, less than the Iliad.
The only real disappointment to me is the long delay on release. I had hoped to be reading ebooks on the Sony device back in May. Oh well.
Many thanks for your thoughts, Ryanramseyer. Actually we’d agree to a great extent. Sony is Teresa not. The PR campaign seems mostly useless. So far, at least, Sony shows little evidence of caring about consumer needs; we’re talking about a slick selling job here, not an honest effort to listen. I’m glad your expectations for those people are so low. Mine are lower.
Remember: you won’t be able to read DRMed books–the kind the big publishers insist on–except in Sony’s pathetic BBeB format. You can read far, far more more books in, say, Mobipocket. While the iLiad will cost more, it will allow access to more books. I’d rather it be cheaper, but until the Sony does more, the iRex machine actually should be a better value.
That said, I hope you enjoy your new Sony when it comes. Keep us posted. I myself will do what I can to enlighten Sony about the need for more a less proprietary approach, but I won’t get my hopes up.
Thanks,
David
oh, I don’t care. As long as it’s easy to create your own ebooks for, it will be fine.
Here’s the hole in their DRM universe; they include a RSS reader, so it’s a trivial task to make a weblog specifically with pirated material, and then add it to your reader like that. I’m sure Sony and their publishing partners are agonizing over this. On the one hand, they know that reading RSS feeds is extremely useful; on the other hand, it will make circumvention easy. My guess is that their iTunes-like application won’t make it possible to convert RSS feeds into permanent content residing on the reader; it will have a rapid expiration date (say one week or two). I am very curious about how Sony tries to solve this problem. Let’s hope they don’t try to.
Well, Robert, it will be interesting to see what Sony does. In fairness to Sony, the machine will be able to read TXT, RTF, PDF, etc., for personal content via conversion; so theoretically people could strip DRM from protected formats and use the just-listed ones. No need for the RSS approach. However, I myself would caution people here in the States and many other countries about the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The currently worded DMCA is a loathsome law that affects even legit uses such as backups, but it exists. I just wish that Sony and politicians would grasp the desirability of the best form of protection–easy availabilty of legal, affordable content.
Thanks, and keep the thoughts coming!
David
I would buy the Sony Reader without question if it would support native non-DRMed content. Instead of having to convert my HTML to BBEB, just support the damn standard out of the box.
Same thing with Apple. FIne, they’re going to have a DRMed e-book version, but I hope they support HTML or TXT or whatever natively rather than conversion.
I hate converting my files — major waste of time to read books that are already in the public domain.
I agree with you, David, and Ryanramseyer. Sony is not making the device because its engineers and executives want a cool device to use themselves: they seek profits. Big profits that can only come from some sort of monopoly.
Remember they have their eyes on Apple’s success with the iPod. That model includes not only the cool device, but also the proprietary, Apple-only DRM format, and the iTunes Music Store. The more iTunes songs you buy, which are only playable on your Apple iPod, the more you are tied in to the whole Apple iPod market. So your next music-player will be another iPod, and you will buy more tunes, TV shows, (and maybe ebooks?) from Apple in their proprietary, DRM format, and then buy another iPod in a year or two… round and round she goes.
This is the brass ring, the Holy Grail for a company like Sony. Losers never forget a war, and Sony has not forgotten the VHS-Betamax war they lost. It’s why they fight so bitterly for Blu-Ray.
Addiding text, html, etc., capabilities to the Sony Reader is much like Apple’s support of mp3 on the iPod: it helps to open up buyers like me who are more interested in reading Gutenberg texts and free ebooks, and who would avoid like the plague any proprietary DRM garbage format. But then, once I bought the Reader, if a cool new book appeared on the Sony Reader store, maybe, just maybe, I’d buy it. And lots of people would be less rigidly opposed to that BBeb format than you or me…these are the great unwashed suckers upon whom Sony is casting its lustful gaze.
“And lots of people would be less rigidly opposed to that BBeb format than you or me…these are the great unwashed suckers upon whom Sony is casting its lustful gaze.”
Well put, Pond! And the Sony PR campaign is directed at them. “Gosh, isn’t it wonderful that big wonderful Sony will take our questions.” Never mind the answers to the format-related ones. Still, we know that nonproprietary formats have a history of winning. The last laugh, then, and maybe even some early laughs, may be on Sony.
Thanks,
David
I got the sony ebook reader mainly to use it to read my pdf base technical books.
I got fooled on this one. Although the sony ebook reader displays pdf files, you can hardly read it – even when you change to landscape orientation. I think Sony forgot that the whole purpose is to read content (after all part of the name of the product is reader).
Sony’s ebook reader does not reflow pdf files!!!! Sure it displays it – but this hardly useable. I am sure they know this, yet they chose to mislead the public by claiming you can read pdf files on their ebook reader