Sony Reader

» see sonyreaderstore.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

sony reader was the kind of thing anglophone professionals bought. it was an english-language e-reader on an english-language storefront with a us / uk / canada / australia footprint. turkey was not a sony reader country. by the time the prs-500 was on us shelves in september 2006 i had been online for eight years on dial-up and then ttnet broadband, but kindle and sony reader were both names i only knew from anandtech and engadget reviews. neither device had any official local distribution where i was, and neither store would have had a useful turkish catalog if it had.

the prs-500 was technically first. sony shipped the original librie in japan in 2004 using e ink corporation's electronic paper display, which by every measure was the first commercial e-ink e-reader ever shipped. when amazon launched the kindle on november 19, 2007, sony had already been in the us market for over a year. that head start should have been a moat. it was not. the kindle had whispernet wireless and a one-click amazon catalog from day one, and the sony reader had a usb cable and a connect store that nobody outside the americas could meaningfully use.

sony spent eight years iterating the hardware. the prs-505 in 2007 made the form factor lighter, the prs-700 in 2008 became the first touchscreen e-reader on the market, then the prs-900 daily edition in 2009 added 3g and a seven-inch screen meant to compete with the kindle dx. all of these arrived on time as hardware. none of them had a comparable store underneath. by 2010 the kindle had close to ninety percent of the e-book market in the us, and sony's response was to start putting its devices into best buy and walmart at lower prices to clear inventory.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the sony reader hardware was good. e ink screens looked closer to paper than to a backlit display and battery life ran for weeks rather than hours. the page turns were physical button clicks that fingers learned the way they learned a remote control. the prs-505 weighed under nine ounces and held about three hundred and fifty books. the touch models added a stylus for note taking which the kindle did not have until the scribe arrived more than a decade later. these were not bad devices.

the store was the problem. sony's connect store launched in 2004 in japan and 2006 in the united states with a catalog that ran on sony's own proprietary broadband ebook format before migrating to epub with adobe drm later. amazon's mobi format and kindle store launched in 2007 with seamless one-click buying over cellular. by the time sony switched to epub the format war had already been called. customers who had bought reader-format books in 2006 had to migrate them through a desktop application that did not always work cleanly. it was the kind of friction that erodes trust slowly and finally.

~ what really happened ~

on february 6, 2014 sony announced it was closing the reader store across north america and europe at the end of march, with australia included in the same wind-down. existing purchases would be migrated to kobo, the canadian e-reader company that toronto's indigo books had spun off in 2009. customers could either accept the migration or lose access to their books. then on august 1, 2014 sony issued a second statement saying it was not going to release any further consumer e-readers. the prs-t3 from 2013 was the last model. the existing stock would sell through and that would be that.

the japanese reader store stayed open longer. the global reader store software for managing existing libraries was finally discontinued on march 31, 2023, ending the last piece of sony reader infrastructure. by then sony had spent nine years exiting the market it had built first.

~ the long tail ~

the sony reader has a small but real afterlife. the e ink screens still work and the buttons still click. the devices show up on japanese auction sites and reddit r/ereader threads with people loading calibre-converted epubs on them through the desktop sync app. the prs-505 in particular has a reputation in the diy ebook community as one of the cleanest hardware platforms ever made for reading public-domain text. it is a small audience but a durable one.

the larger story is that sony invented the modern e-reader category and lost it to a company with a bookstore. amazon understood that the device was a delivery mechanism for a store and built whispernet to remove every friction between wanting a book and reading it. sony built a good device and put it on a usb cable. that was the entire war.

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