Sony pulls the plug on e-readers

Sony pulls the plug on e-readers ,

Sony is giving up on e-readers after facing stiff competition from rivals like Amazon’s Kindle. "We do not have plans to develop a successor Reader model at this time," says a Sony spokesperson in a statement to BBC News. The PRS-T3 is the last Sony e-reader and it will be sold across Europe until stocks sell out. The move comes just months after Sony shuttered its ebook distribution store in the US and Canada, making it less surprising that the company is killing off the associated hardware.

Sony will still keep selling its e-reader hardware in Japan alongside ebooks from its online store. That might not mean much for its prospects in Sony’s home turf of Japan though. While Sony and Kobo have attempted to beat Amazon’s e-readers, the Kindle became Japan’s top-selling e-reader taking 38.3 percent of the market just months after its launch in the region. Sony e-reader axing follows recent plans to give up on PlayStation Mobile for Android, and its sell off of its VAIO computer division to a Japanese investment fund earlier this year.