25/09/08

eBook Haters – The New Luddites?

I was in Waterstones’ flagship London Piccadilly store yesterday, and decided to take a look at their in-store presentation of the Sony Reader. (And before you accuse me of being a hater, I am a fan of electronic books, despite some people’s interpretation of previous posts.)

The good news is that I was told that Waterstones is completely out of stock, and so is Sony. [Perhaps, as with the PSP, the PlayStation and the iPhone, Sony is playing a deft game of supply and demand, keeping an exclusiveness around the product, rather than flooding the market with it. And they are clearly selling.]

The more bizarre news is that there is a Sony Reader on display on each of the five floors of the Piccadilly store – and I was told by staff that each device, on every floor (bar the second floor) has had all of the pre-installed titles – all 100 of them – manually deleted from the reader. By a member of the public.

Furthermore, Piccadilly is not the only store to have this happen to them… Who is the luddite doing this, and why?

Some photos after the jump.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Publishing.

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