Sony has had a long and storied history in selling digital content and have been making e-readers for far longer. They first launched their digital bookstore in 2012 and stocked it with ebooks. This store was available in many markets, such as Canada, United States and United Kingdom. They populated it with bestselling books, the same type of content that could be found on Amazon and Kobo. The company has a web reader and a series of dedicated apps for Android and iOS. Sony announced in early February 2014 that Reader Store in the US and Canada would close on March 20, 2014, and transfer customers to Kobo. Accordingly, Reader Store is now closed in all of the markets they operated in. If you had a Sony e-reader, their was a firmware update that would replace the store to Kobo. In 2019 Kobo sent an email to all users letting them know, they would close support for their store on Sony e-readers and discontinued it shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, during all of this drama, the Sony Reader Store in Japan has still been going strong, to this very day.
Sony launched the Reader Store in Japan in 2012, the same year it rolled it out to other markets. Since Sony is based in Japan, they had an easier time securing the right to digital content. Over the years the company has added manga, comic books, magazines and lite novels. Everything on the site can be be downloaded as a sample, which is good if you want to find out the quality of the manga. They currently have a massive library of 700,000 titles, this makes it 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 anywhere, you can still buy and read it, since nothing is region locked and you can just buy with your own credit card. Content can be read on any internet browser, which means you can buy and read stuff 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.
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The post The Sony Reader Store is alive and well in Japan first appeared on Good e-Reader.