Sony 80 Is Almost Here
On June 23rd, the next ObsoleteSony book launches on Kickstarter.
Before I talk about the new book, I want to say something about the last one.
The response to Sony Personal Audio meant a lot to me. When you are making a book, you spend so much time inside tiny details that it becomes hard to see it clearly anymore. For a long time, the book is not really a book. It is just work. Then suddenly it is out in the world, and people are holding it, photographing it, sending messages, and noticing things I hoped someone would notice.
That has been incredibly moving, so before anything else, thank you. Not only to everyone who bought Sony Personal Audio, but also to everyone who has supported ObsoleteSony here on Substack, shared the work, subscribed, commented, or simply kept reading. Even if you never bought a book, that support has helped me keep the research going. It is what makes it possible to keep spending time with this history, and to turn years of small discoveries into something bigger.
Every book has taught me something. Sony Year by Year was the first real step into making ObsoleteSony more than a feed. Sony Personal Audio pushed things further. Now I am getting ready to launch the third one, and I want it to be the best ObsoleteSony book so far.
The new book is called Sony 80. It goes live on Kickstarter on June 23rd, and the project page is already available to follow here:
Following the page now really helps. It costs nothing, Kickstarter will notify you when the campaign goes live, and those early follows make a real difference on launch day.
I do not want to reveal too much yet, but the idea is simple. Sony 80 is my attempt to tell the story of Sony’s first 80 years through 80 ideas: products, formats, design choices, strange risks, big successes, and a few failures too. It is not trying to include everything Sony ever made. It is about choosing the moments where you can really see Sony changing.
For me, this book feels like the result of more than five years of researching and writing about Sony almost every day. ObsoleteSony started as a place to share my fascination with old Sony products, but over time it became something larger. It became a way to understand how Sony thought, how it designed, how it advertised, and why people still care about these objects decades later.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The products matter, of course, but the way Sony presented them matters too. The ads, the photography, the packaging, the language, the confidence. Sony at its best, made technology feel like the future had arrived as something you could hold, hear, watch, carry, or play. That is the feeling I want Sony 80 to have.
Running ObsoleteSony is not just posting old electronics. It is researching, collecting, scanning, reading old magazines, fixing mistakes, finding better images, and trying to build an archive that is actually useful to people who care about this history. That is also why I want to apologize for not publishing as many articles here over the last couple of months. I love writing on Substack, but the books take an incredible amount of work. A finished book looks clean and calm. Making it is anything but.
As a small thank you, I also decided to keep my first book, Sony Year by Year, available in full for free to paid supporters. That book was an important step for ObsoleteSony, and I want supporters here to keep having access to it.
The Kickstarter launches on June 23rd. Please follow the project page now so you are notified when it goes live:
And if you can, please share this post. It would help enormously.
Thank you for supporting the books, the archive, and the work behind ObsoleteSony.
— Eddie