In an interview with Fujio Noguchi, deputy president of Sony’s ereader business he said:
Readers are the best sellers on their US Sony Style website and sales volume has quadrupled year over year. Sales were so high over Christmas that registrations brought their servers down on Christmas day.
The best selling model is the Touch edition which surprised them because they thought the low priced Pocket edition would take that place.
Sony wants to use e-ink for its displays, not LCD, so it will wait until color e-ink is available before introducing a color reader. The e-ink displays used by Sony are manufactured to Sony’s standards and the e-ink display for the Daily Edition was developed solely for Sony.
Thanks to E-Reader-info.com for the heads up.
Sony had better watch their back. There are some new ereaders coming out that are less expensive and loaded with goodies.
I am interested in seeing the new Asus readers-going to be very affordable as well.
The Asus DR-950 E-Ink device? Looks nice; but GBP 250 doesn’t really seem thaaat affordable, although it is an improvement (today that’s a bit over USD 413 at the ‘typical credit card rate’). So prices may be creeping downward, but aren’t plummeting.
Haven’t read much on it yet. The photo I saw looked nice; will be interested to learn what its features are. Evidently there will be a 2gb and a 4gb model. That’s fairly attractive; but I imagine a day when the amount of memory will be large indeed. Memory’s so cheap these days, I’m a little surprised that we’re not already there.
The cheapest large screen E-Ink devices in the US are the Sony PRS-900 and the iRex DR800SG, both at $399. The DR800S (no 3G) is GBP 449, and in general a 1:1 exchange rate for electronics between Europe and the US isn’t unusual.
Asus is often optimistic about their pre-release price estimates, but the Jinke A9 (also using SiPix) price has been estimated at €350.
It appears that the SiPix 9″ screen is going to be relatively inexpensive, and will likely drive prices down to $250-$350 in the US. If SiPix can deliver in quantity, this is going to put price pressure on the 7″ and 8″ devices and even the 9.7″ and up devices.
I love my Sony Reader Touch, but I really wish that Sony would improve their OS and offer more updates. There are so many little things here and there in the OS that are annoying. For example, the list of your books refuses to use the “file-as” attribute of epub’s author metadata, and instead sorts your books by the author’s first name.
I’d also be ecstatic if they would (when it’s available) add support to their readers for B&N’s DRM.
Oh yea, and the Reader Library software for the PC really sucks.