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Sony Adds New "Family Tree" Marketing Tool to the Sony Reader Store

family-tree-romanceSony is building something of a reputation for unusual ebook marketing tactics, and this week they added a new trick to their repertoire. They’ve adapted the infographics that were first debuted in April and turned them into a 'family tree" that shows you a book’s literary lineage.

Sony has released several infographics, with one focused on general fiction and mystery genre and another that combines romance and and Sci-Fi. That latter infographic is particularly entertaining.

The Sci-Fi family tree is a rather curious one, and it includes inbreeding, infidelity, and other Jerry Springeresque connections. For example, someone at Sony Reader Store listed the fantasy novel Game of Thrones as being the child of Total Recall and A Wrinkle in Time. Who do you think was being cheated on, I wonder? And then in the next generation The Hunger Games has an incestuous relationship with its cousin Game of Thrones to produce The Fault in Our Stars.

I do not mean to cast aspersions on a person’s family history, but whoever designed this family tree has serious issues. I was under the impression that family trees were supposed to fork, not merge. (No hillbilly jokes, please.)

Over the past year Sony has been making a serious investment in their ebookstore. They have released a new reading app that supports Epub3, added expert reviews, and started working on new ways to market ebooks to readers. It’s pretty clear that their primary goal is less to make money on ebooks and more to cash in on the content sold on their hardware, but they are still a presence in the market.

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