Our minds on media.

I can’t believe that Sony missed the boat so badly on this one. Apple realized early on that the iPod was never going to fly unless you could get all your music on to it. They didn’t care how you did that. In fact, their first campaign with iTunes was “Rip. Mix. Burn” It wasn’t UNTIL people were using iPods like crazy that Apple went to the music industry with some leverage and said, “Hey, do you want in on this?” Sony’s horrible DRM and lackluster product design show that Sony probably went to the publishers first who of course only gave a very tentative “Maybe. And only if you erase the books every 60 days!” Duh. I’ve seen elsewhere that book publishers have no offered more than tentative support but in reality who doesn’t want to at least keep some works for reference? For me, at least, there is NO point in having a digital reader unless I can use it for reference. That means BIG hard drive and I get to keep the shit I buy. Content producers will never want to understand that. It’s the job of the hardware companies to make them understand that consumer desire (or at least take advantage of it) and Sony, for one, missed the boat.