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E-reader battles: With three million Kindles expected by 2010’s end, how should Sony fight back?
August 11, 2009 | 9:23 am
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By David Rothman
E-bookers will be reading off 1.5 million Kindles year’s end and three million by December 31, 2009, according to Jim Friedland, a Cowan analyst.
I don’t know what the figures are from Sony, but its total might lag the Kindle’s—even considering that Sony’s marketing has been global rather than just confined to the States.
In Sony’s place, whether it’s ahead or behind, what would you do? Some of the steps are obvious. A large-screen e-reader would help, and in fact iReaderReview is wondering whether the Sony might announce one shortly. Cellular-style wireless or at least WiFi—ideally both—would help even more, with close integration with stores.
But beyond that, how should Sony respond? Here are three possible approaches:
- Look beyond E Ink and think about also introducing e-readers using Pixel Qi technology. They could display color in fine style. E Ink won’t have that capability for several years.
- Sell an extra–lightweight netbook—with Pixel Qi tech and a touch screen—that folded up to become a tablet. The software would already be optimized for e-book use. What’s more, the nonbook apps might use remote software running off Google servers—yes, cloud computing. Remember, Sony already is relying on Google for public domain books.
- Go after the school and library market while emphasizing the range of choice for users—netbooks, not just the usual tablets.
By the way, Amazon itself could try any of the three approaches mentioned. It’ll be interesting to see if either company does, and if so, which gets there first.
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Comments:
First, and most important, get access to the Kindle library. If the next generation of the Sony reader handled my Kindle books AND books from elsewhere, it would be my upgrade choice!
Sony is good at hardware, and Amazon has a pretty good lock on the best content library.
Bezos said, at BEA 2008, if I recall correctly, that he wasn’t interested in being the hardware company, but the content company. And Amazon has certainly made the agreement with Apple to allow Kindle books onto Apple hardware, so why not Sony?
If I were Sony, I’d be looking to do two things: First, License with Amazon to manufacture a Kindle reader; and optionally, arrange to add LRF to it, allowing the Sony bookstore content to be added to Amazon’s content.
The second thing would be to create free LRF software readers for other platforms; or to convert its library to ePub, opening it up to all platforms with ePub readers. That would open up their market to more potential reader buyers.
Actually, if there was a third thing Sony could do, it would be: Advertise, for God’s sake!
*stunned* FORTY MILLION iPhone/iPod Touch out there and you neglect to say release SOFTWARE for those that can read LRF/BBeB?
Thanks, Marion. Great analysis of the strengths of Sony and Amazon!
May I respectfully suggest, however, that the ePub industry standard would be the best way to open up Amazon content to owners of different kinds of machines?
ePub, unlike the Kindle format, is neutral.
If Bezos is serious about being a content company–last I knew, he was talking about separate businesses for content and hardware–then ePub should make sense for him. Let’s hope Amazon will see the logic here.
As others are saying now, not just TeleRead, Amazon is really foolish to isolate itself with a proprietary format.
Thanks,
David
Anybody expecting Sony to seriously impact Amazon’s business is betting on the wrong horse. Sony is a hardware company that doesn’t do software particularly well and does services, especially online, particularly poorly. And they have a tin ear for customer needs.
They are improving; they know their future hinges on it. But they are nowhere near competitive on software or services.
The reason I believe those estimates (for the most part) is that Amazon has no effective competition today and they are obviously planning to expand to other markets in the stated time frame.
Sony has the name and the visibility but their Reader operation is tiny and isolated from the corporate mainstream (the latter is actually is a good thing). Their *near term* resources are not particularly better than what Plastic Logic or iRex might be able to muster.
To put it another way: we’re not going to see Oprah hawking Sony Readers any time soon, are we?Not more than she is likely to be hawking a Bookeen or an Astak. They may be good products in their own right but Amazon has the high ground.
Like it or not, Amazon has clear sailing for the next year or so, barring an Apple entry into the eBook retailing business through iTunes. They have a high-visibility mature product with a solid business model while everybody else is fumbling around for positioning. 3 million by the end of 2010? Might be conservative.
After that, though, things should get interesting.
Somebody will emerge.
And the fun part is guessing who it will be.
But don’t expect it to be Sony. No reflection on the product; its just that the company is in no position financially and managerially to mount a sustained, serious thrust in this business. Not for another two years, at least.
If I were Sony, I’d … sell out to some other company anything of value and go blow my brains out. Sheesh, they have fallen terribly since the heady days of the Walkman and the 3.5″ floppy disk.
Failing that, I would search the company or the top Japanese tech universities and find a genius, and just let him run the company. Fire all bean-counters, go semi-private, sell the vilm company, the record company, and all those losers. Concentrate on the company roots: innovative electronics. Period.
Well, seriously, though: I second David’s notion of Pixel Qi screens. That’s assuming those screens really do look nice and work well; we don’t know that yet. But if they are good, then I’d go further, and come out with a folio-type reader, like the OLPC XO2, which opens like a magazine to show two opposing touchscreens. Perfect for magazines, manga, and books; good for newspaper reading too, with one screen functioning as a contents guide, the opposite as text; or else allowing magazines to do what they do now in print, a page of text opposing a page of ads.
Make a couple of editions of the thing: one that hooks up to the cloud, the other without wireless.
And I’d forget all about the iTunes Store copycats: just do hardware, and make it open enough to support developers who can put applications on it, so that FBreader, mobi, ereader, and any epub readers can be developed for it, including connections for google books, the barnes and noble store, and everybody else, including Amazon if they wish.
It isn’t that hard. What’s hard is trying to straddle the gulf between the two different worlds of consumer electronics, where you want to give your customers the most functions and flexibility and openness, and of publishing, where you want to lock everything down and restrict your customers and squeeze every last penny out of them.
But what’s the point? Sony isn’t listening to any sense these days. They have been doomed ever since they decided that they needed to prevent any future reccurences of losing the Betamax war by owning a movie studio.
Pixel Qi screens will be available to any manufacturer so Sony selling readers with that tech doesn’t really give them anything other than perhaps a temporary advantage.
If the Pixel Qi screens really do prove to be the cats pajamas for ereader screen tech certainly the Kindle will also use them.
It’s going to take something else to give Sony some sort of distinction that buyers might perceive as advantageous over just buying a Kindle. I don’t have a clue what that might be.