Sony has a long and rich history of selling digital content and has been making e-readers for much longer. They started their digital bookstore for the first time in 2012 and filled it with e-books. This deal was available in many markets like Canada, United States and United Kingdom. They filled it with bestselling books, the same type of content found on Amazon and Kobo. The company has a web reader and a number of dedicated apps for Android and iOS. Sony announced in early February 2014 that the Reader Store in the US and Canada would be closing on March 20, 2014 and customers would be transferred to Kobo. Accordingly, the Reader Store is now closed in all markets where they operated. If you had a Sony e-reader, there was a firmware update that would replace the Store with Kobo. 2019 sent Kobo an email to all users They let them know that they would be closing support for their store on Sony e-readers and discontinuing it shortly thereafter. In the meantime, through all this drama, the Sony Reader Store in Japan is still going strong to this day.
Sony launched Reader Store in Japan in 2012 and rolled it out to other markets that same year. Since Sony is based in Japan, they had an easier time securing the rights to digital content. Over the years, the company has added manga, comics, magazines, and lite novels. Everything on the site can be downloaded as an example, which is good if you want to find out the quality of the manga. They currently have a massive library of 700,000 titles, making them one of the top three bookstores still in existence today. 90% of everything on the platform is in Japanese. So if you speak the language and live somewhere, you can still buy and read it as nothing is region locked and you can just buy with your own credit card. Content can be read in any internet browser, which means you can buy and read content on the Kindle and Kobo e-readers. You can install the APK on virtually any smartphone or tablet, including E INK-based devices. However, the APK can only be downloaded from the Japanese version of the Play website, but you can download it from the Good e-Reader App Store.
Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audio books and e-readers for twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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