Sony Exiting eBook Markets in Europe and Australia
It’s not surprising given the closures in the North America market, but there was still slight hope that Sony wouldn’t give up on ebook reading for good—that is clearly not the case anymore.
This is another sad tale of Sony giving up on something that they had an integral part in starting. It’s quite pathetic, really. Now ereading fans will lose what little respect they had left for Sony. Nobody likes a quitter.
This is a company that didn’t even know how to start.
Once again, those who were young at Sony said from the beginning the Reader should have wireless. They were overruled by the veteran Suits.
And here we are today.
Everyone involved in this fiasco should resign or be fired.
Previously here:
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
You could see all this coming very early in the ebook business. Sony launched a fairly decent initial model, then mostly got it right in terms of hardware with the PRS-700. Nice metal construction, buttons that worked, good screen for the time. But, the software … sigh.
The base software was built on Adobe’s ADE which worked but was unstable. To add a book to your “library” on the 700, you needed a physical (USB) connection to a PC running an authorized copy of ADE. ADE was unstable and crashed far too often. Discussions with Sony and Adobe execs had each blaming the other for the problems. A senior Sony marketing exec showed me how he had bypassed ADE with a little Linux hack … there was frustration even in the middle management ranks.
I think that the ultimate problem here was, ereaders were “just another product” for Sony top execs. The days of top management championing new product (for e.g. Morita and The Walkman) were gone. Howard Stringer and company were a new breed of generalists who watched the bottom line, not the products (Stringer lived in Greenwich, CT and wasn’t walking the factory floors to get worker feedback). Middle managers blamed suppliers or any other convenient targets, and then said “we can’t fix this” as a cop-out.
So Sony (and too many others) became a company run by bankers who didn’t understand product. Sony is unravelling. Stringer, knighted for his work, has retired. Sad.
Yep. And now someone is saying Stringer should be considered to lead the BBC. Holy shit. R.I.P. BBC if that happens.
It seems like they just refuse to compete on hardware or ebook pricing. They were one of the most expensive places to purchase ebooks…
They shouldn’t have even gotten in. It was a device thing for them. They didn’t understand books at all and had no interest in them.