Comment by asoneth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asoneth | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> They should be cheaper.

I'm curious how much you think an e-reader should cost?

Let's say the BOM for a bargain-bin e-reader is ~$65: e-ink display (~$25), mainboard (~$15), touchscreen and/or buttons (~$7), radios (~$3), battery (~$3), case (~$3), assembly (~$6), packaging (~$3). Forget about a charging cable. Then you've got to iron out the drivers and software, provide support, handle returns (which will be higher if you cheap out on materials) and turn a profit (assuming you're not Amazon). Let's say you charge ~1.5x BOM, now your product is ~$98.

Maybe you "borrow" your software and hardware designs from a competitor. Maybe you're willing to continuously change your company name so you can purchase low-quality parts without having to accept returns. Maybe you ask suppliers for a discount because you just know you're going to have enormous economies of scale and you're somehow more convincing than every other company (that isn't Amazon) asking for the same discount.

You do all of the above so you can sell your new e-reader for the insanely low price of $80. Will you move enough units for all that to be worth it? Are there really that many customers who would buy your $80 no-name e-reader instead of a second-hand Kindle?

6 inch color eink 24$ on alibaba, esp32 c3 cpu 3$ (incl wifi, ble, usbc) case 1$ probably. Assembly in china 3$ (done that), packaging temu style, transport temu style, touch layer I don't know.

BOM for a color eink about 35$ all together for a mass produced quantity of one, delivered anywhere (until tariffs).

Assumed quantity of customers, millions? Its so cheap that governments could give it out to schools, one eink ebook per child, cheaper than one year's worth of school books anyway.

If you can sell a functional 6" e-reader with a total BOM of $35 (i.e. retails in the ~$50 range) it seems like that would sell very well.

Assuming it's that simple, do you have an alternate theory as to why e-readers in this range are not more common?

Giving E-ink Corporation most of the profit via that 25$ screen is too much risk to make back on users who actually sign up to your store and buy books vs ones that put the gift in the closet, clearance models, losing to a more popular store, etc.

> too much risk to make back on users who actually sign up to your store and buy books vs ones that put the gift in the closet, clearance models, losing to a more popular store

I definitely agree that selling hardware at cost (or at a loss) in the hopes of turning a profit off of content sales is an extremely risky strategy. Many companies try that approach, few succeed.

But if you price it like a typical consumer product and sell it for ~1.5 * BOM (i.e. ~$50 retail price on $35 BOM) then you don't need anyone to buy books because you can survive off the profit from the hardware alone. And because I believe that a $50 ereader would sell well, I don't know why they are not more common if it really is possible to build and assemble a mass-market ereader with a $35 BOM as the prior poster claimed.

The Rpi Zero has better CPU than the Kindle Paper White. The original sale price was $5. No way Kindle chip BOM is much more than that.

Most of the rest of your calculations mostly make sense.

Fair. I was bundling ports, memory, and connectors in the mainboard cost, but it's probably still on the high end.

that just pushes the question back a step - why is the BOM not decreasing (in real terms) over time as the components get easier and more efficient to produce?

Well the pricest component is the screen, and that's under patent.

I think rising consumer expectations soak up a lot of that -- you could make the main board and other components a third the price if you're satisfied with mid-2000s specs e.g. 200MB storage, slow page turns, bundled radios, no touchscreen, no PDF support, etc.

At some point the raw materials cost (which generally aren't getting much cheaper) becomes a major factor and that's harder to cut without a new approach.

Eink screen aside, it may be that we're just nearing the limits with current manufacturing approaches and that the next leap requires a wildly different approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com