Sony built the first commercial E Ink reader, then let Amazon take the market and left

Sony pioneered the commercial e-reader. It launched the Librié in Japan in April 2004, the first device to use E Ink, and brought the Reader PRS-500 to the United States in September 2006 — a year before Amazon's Kindle.

Sony moved respectable numbers early — about 300,000 units by December 2008 — and claimed a strong share of a young market. But Amazon's Kindle, tied to a book store and priced aggressively, grew faster, and the iPad's arrival in 2010 reshaped the tablet and e-reader market around it.

By 2010 the Reader held roughly 6% of the market, around 800,000 of the 12.8 million e-readers sold worldwide that year, according to IDC. Sony's device was a hardware pioneer with a store that never matched Amazon's.

Sony pulled the Reader from North America in late 2013, closed its Reader Stores and migrated users to Kobo in early 2014, and announced in August 2014 that it would make no more e-readers. The category it invented was abandoned to the company that built the ecosystem around it.