Sony, battling Amazon and Apple in the electronic book reader race, said yesterday it would launch its latest devices in Japan in December along with a dedicated virtual library. The move will mark a return to Japan for the electronic giant’s e-reader business since it left the market in 2007 after seeing low demand at a time when Japanese consumers were focused on mobile phone books.
The success of Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle has however sent electronics makers scrambling to gain a slice of the growing tablet computer and e-reader market. Sony has cut the size and weight of its e-readers while expanding the use of touch technology to all models — allowing users to turn pages with a swipe of the finger like the Apple iPad.
Unlike the color iPad, the Sony Reader uses black-and-white e-ink technology.
Its two models, the Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition, will be available on December 10 in about 300 Japanese stores, selling for ￥20,000 and ￥25,000 (US$240 and US$300).
Sony will also open a digital bookstore for the device in Japan as it has elsewhere, offering downloads of around 20,000 titles. The group hopes to sell 300,000 e-readers in Japan in the first year and expects a 50 percent market share by 2012, the company said.
It also recently created a joint venture with Japan’s second-largest telecommunications operator KDDI, the Asahi newspaper group and printing technology firm Toppan, to offer services for a variety of devices. Sony unveiled the latest devices in September and expanded their availability to Australia, China, Italy and Spain as well as the US.
Separately, Japanese electronics firm Sanyo yesterday said it is unable to keep up with huge demand for its new cooker that turns uncooked rice into loaves of bread, forcing it to temporarily halt sales.
The company said it will stop taking orders for its ￥50,000 Gopan rice bread cooker on Dec. 1 as the electronics maker looks to boost production capacity at its plant in China.
It plans to resume taking new orders in April for what it claims to be the world’s first cooker to mill rice into powder and bake bread.
The company said the orders it had received since its Nov. 11 release far outstripped the 58,000 it had planned to sell by the end of March next year.
Sanyo says it will deliver the cooker to customers who have already placed orders by the end of this month, but warned deliveries could be as late as March.
The company received a deluge of advance orders since unveiling the device in July, and postponed its originally planned launch last month to first secure enough stock.
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