Sony’s 3 Million “Downloads”
When you think about it, best case, that’s 36 months since the 500 launched, maybe 100k books “downloaded” a year. Sony gives everybody 100 classics, which with 300k readers, should mean at least 30 million “downloads”–just of the free stuff.
Now, certain publishers, like Rosetta, said that the Sony store was a great place to sell their merchandise, however for years, Sony was screwing every small publisher in the land, so Sony’s store inventory was but a fraction of what Amazon’s was at launch, so Rosetta et al didn’t have the competition it might have otherwise.
So, 100k books “downloaded” a month. Let’s be generous, say only half that is “free.” 50k ebooks a month sold. Amazon gets more than that in a day (move my Kindle store sales to Sony, and I’d be a top-5 publisher).
But to pull other numbers out of my ass:
Palm devices that “could” read ebooks: 10 million.
WinCE (Axim/Jornada/Ipaq) that “could” read ebooks: 4 million.
Iphone devices that might be used to read ebooks: 550k.
Sony devices: 300k.
Actual ebook sales to all of the above markets, combined, over a decade? Bupkiss.
As we can see, Kindle brings more bookbuyers.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea for Sony to screw over the publishing partners, and go to sites that encourage IRC book trading and still refuse to follow the tenets of the Creative Commons license. Ad. Nauseum.