Amazon and B&N don’t love Canada—but oh how Sony’s e-book side does!
By Ficbot
With Amazon, and now Barnes & Noble, coming out with major new releases, it looks like competition is heating up at last in the emerging e-reader marketplace.
Like most e-book fans, I read the news with interest. Following the not unexpected but still disappointing news that neither the international Kindle nor the B&N Nook would be made available to Canadians soon, I started wondering about people who shop based on features and people who shop based on brand loyalty.
I always thought I was a tough customer who researched every purchase carefully and shopped on the features. But as I read the details about these spiffy new products—available to everyone but YOU, Ficbot, you CANADIAN, you—I looked at my Sony in a new light.
Canada love from Sony
Sony loves Canada. They want me to buy their readers. I got mine in a store, even! Retail! From a clerk who even was properly trained and knew his stuff! Sony has given me the Mac software. They have given me the Google Books access.
The Sony Reader is my only hardware besides a proper computer on which I can read library books—and my local library system seems to loves the Sony just as much as the Sony loves them, because they have about 200 novels, as recent as the new Dan Brown best-seller, available in ePub and PDF via Overdrive. Add in the non-fiction and young adult categories, and there are about 300 books I can download for free, from home, and read on the go. And what does it say on the Overdrive FAQ about the Amazon Kindle? No library books for you! Take that, America!
All kidding aside, my takeaway from all this is an important one. The PR war may be as important, at least in some markets, as the actual product features. Sony has been in the game long enough to prove that they are committed to their e-book customers. I read Project Gutenberg books on a 1st gen Clie when I was living overseas where I had limited access to books. I have progressed since then to other gizmos, including my beloved 505 from Sony. When Amazon offered wireless, Sony matched it. When ePub became an emerging standard, Sony heartily approved. Lesson number one: the features aren’t so important. If I wait long enough, Sony will match them eventually.
And lesson number two: given the choice, I would prefer Sony to, because for the first time in my techie life, I am feeling brand loyal. I buy Macs because they work better for me, not from any particular love of Apple. if someone else made something cheaper that worked just as well, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. But the Sony…nobody else has cared about the Canadian market, and there was Sony going, “Hi, Canada! Amazon locked you out, but WE have a Canadian store! With Mac support! And Google Books.” There was every e-tailer slapping on the geographical restrictions, and a month later, half those books are available through Overdrive at my public library for free. Readable only on…The Sony.
So, if anyone from Sony is reading this, I have a message for you. Sony, you have won the PR war, at least as far as this reader goes. You have earned my loyalty.
I can’t promise I won’t be tempted by a snazzy new feature or two (hint: some people want to use dictionary lookups with languages other than English…) And I can’t promise an Apple Tablet won’t woo me to the dark side. But I appreciate that you’ve been plugging away at the Canadian market when everyone else is shunning us so unjustly. I’ll keep an eye on you, and prefer your products should they do the job for me.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Well, that’s what companies are supposed to do, to make happy customers. It’s nice to know some companies out there still get it.
Not surprising, since Amazon is a web-based reseller, and B&N is a publishing reseller, that they are out of touch with everything except their bottom lines…
October 24th, 2009 at 8:02 am
Keep in mind that Sony was the first in the market and they introduced in the USA before Canada as well. The original PRS-500 was introduced in the USA Sept 2006 and was never made available in Canada. The PRS-505 was introduced in the USA in Oct 2007 and wasn’t made available in Canada until April 2008 (and for some bizarre reason they excluded Quebec).
Both the Amazon and B&N offerings bundle wireless bookstore access and I suspect that this is the largest barrier to entry in Canada. We have one of the highest cost wireless services in the world and they probably aren’t able to make a deal with the wireless companies like they can in other countries.
Also note that the Sony PRS-900 release indicated it wouldn’t be available in Canada either. I suspect Sony is running into the same difficulty as Amazon.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:41 am
SONY loves Canada because it was a Canadian who first took a chance on importing their small transistor radio. I was very surprised when the first eBooks were not available here at the same time, or even before they were released elsewhere.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Here’s hoping next month Sony, Amazon and B&N introduce 3G versions of their respective readers into Canada once Bell &c. start up their new systems. Hope springs eternal …
October 24th, 2009 at 10:58 am
I couldn’t help laugh about the comment re Quebec. I can only assume the draconian language laws were a big factor in shutting out the Quebecois.
October 24th, 2009 at 11:27 am
If you figure that $400 is probably 70 or so books, let’s suppose that it will cost the publisher of each of those books $20,000 to acquire the UK rights. So they’re giving up $400 to avoid spending $1.4 million, which doesn’t sound like such a bad deal. It will take legislative action to fix this; there need to be no such thing as electronic rights that can be sub-divided geographically.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Sony *loves* Canada, because it can. Sony’s an electronics manufacturer, not a publisher; and they are not the primary content provider for the device. Until the Kindle became a threat, the Reader was the red-headed stepchild of Sony Corp. — it was practically impossible to find on their Website, and I had to deduce on my own that that *electronic* device wasn’t freaking *searchable across titles*. (Near-complete absence of reference titles from their bookstore.) Sony let Amazon do its homework on how people read and what the reading public really demands from an electronic reading device.
Yet — I am deeply grateful to Sony for being first. I don’t even want to think about where we’d be now if they hadn’t taken a pretty big risk and started the ball rolling. And now, *finally*, I can almost say that I do love Sony — because of the PRS-600, which finally has what are for me the most important functions. I’m in the U.S., and a preeetty happy Kindle 2 owner. But the second e-ink device in the house really *could* be a Sony.
Especially since Sony and Germany appear to love each other as much as Sony and Canada. I would (apparently) be able to download ePub titles for the Sony from a Web retailer there. (I don’t know why not. They’ve never minded sending me print.) Oh. And there’s that pdf thing, too, that Sony purportedly does and the Kindle emphatically does *not*…