Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

The news of Sony teaming up with self-published books seller SmashWords and with Author Solutions is interesting and it gives us the chance to review Sony’s overall strategy.  

Sony’s Overall Strategy - 3 Main Aspects

Sony has suddenly woken up to the fact that the eReader market is going to be huge and is making a lot of moves. Look carefully and a pattern begins to emerge with 3 main threads –  

1. Attack all of Amazon’s weaknesses – This means being open (for now), going retail, and striking up collaborations.
2. Matching as many of Amazon’s strengths as possible. The tie-up with SmashWords is part of this.
3. Selling an electronic device that happens to read books i.e. focusing on the device.

Sony seems to have decided that eReaders are a market it needs to win and that this holiday season is the time to do it.

Attacking Amazon Weaknesses

Openness and Collaboration as a Weapon

One big weakness Amazon has is that it’s building a bit of a walled garden. Sony has seized on that and is doing a lot of things to attack this aspect -

Formats and Books 

1. Support for ePub and PDF.
2. It still has DRM – However, if it can’t match up with the Kindle soon it might drop DRM.
3. Letting in Google Books. 

Distribution and Content Creation

1. Partnering with Retailers and selling Sony Readers in stores.  
2. Partnering with online retailers.  
3. Letting companies like Smashwords and Author Solutions have their share. 

In general, Sony is partnering with companies instead of building its own expertise. Its providing the device and letting the other parts of the publishing eco-system align around the device.

The magic trick might be yet to come - if Sony wins out will they be able to resist the temptation to gradually eat up more and more of Publishing?

Free Books as a Weapon

In many ways Sony is happy to let the books industry get overwhelmed by Free and Cheap as long as they keep selling eReaders.

Look at what they’ve done -

1. 1 million free books from Google. 
2. ePub and PDF Support which makes reading pirated books easier (for example, the new Dan Brown novel was available pirated as an ePub in 15 minutes).  
3. Low number of new, paid books.  

When you have 1 million free books and 100K paid books in your store you are definitely not focused on selling books. 

To be fair, focusing on free books is not a bad strategy (unless you are a publisher or author).

Amazon Kindle Vs Sony on Paid Books

Sony is quite happy to let other companies focus on the ‘selling books’ part. There are a few reasons for this -

1. Unlike Amazon, Sony has neither the expertise nor the need to sell books.  
2. It goes with the whole openness and collaboration strategy to let other companies sell books.  
3. It goes with Sony’s expertise in consumer electronics to focus only on the eReader. 

The 2nd reason is really important – There has to be an incentive for other companies, retailers, etc. to side with Sony and paid books is one major incentive.

At some level Sony’s support for ePub and PDF is a direct result of this ‘leaving books free for everyone’ approach.

Matching Amazon Strengths

Matching WhisperNet

Sony will, in December, finally match a huge Amazon Kindle feature – WhisperNet i.e. always on bookstore and 60 second downloads.

It’s amazing that the best feature (arguably) of the Kindle gets matched by competitors only now (25 months after the Kindle was released).

Sony Vs Amazon Kindle on Self-Published Books

Sony has just added SmashWords and Author Solutions to its stable of collaborators – perhaps as part of its strategy, perhaps as a bet for the future.

What it does is -

1. Set up an alternate channel for independent authors. 
2. Gives companies like Smashwords a better chance of competing with Amazon.
3. Gives readers more options.

If down the line we transition to a world where some major part of publishing is self-publishing Sony and its allies will be better placed to compete.

Focusing on the eReader

The most interesting aspect of Sony’s strategy is its narrow focus on the eReader

If you look deeper it makes a ton of sense -

1. Focus on the electronic device, which is Sony’s speciality anyways.  
2. Let the different companies, new and old, in the publishing system band together and help Sony fight Kindle.
3. Down the line, decide whether to keep things the same way or to take over most of publishing. 

Sony is not losing much – with their current approach they’ll own the device, they’ll own the default store on the device, and they’ll own the customer relationship.

If they choose to, they can expand from that into all of publishing.

 Closing Thoughts - Is Sony’s New Strategy too late?

A recent study commissioned by shopping site Retrevo (771 people) says that 21% of respondents intend to buy an eReader this holiday season. Of these -

1. 62% said they would buy Kindle 2 or Kindle DX.
2. 32% said they would buy Sony Reader.
3. 6% said they would buy another device.

Sony’s presence at retail locations this holiday season will be a definite advantage in the Amazon Kindle Vs Sony battle – However, it’s unlikely to be enough and Sony might find that its strategy, while well thought out, is a year too late.

Filed under: sony reader, thoughts Tagged: | amazon kindle vs sony