Exactly the kind of technology that can kill your business overnight.
Now, imagine Apple finally delivering a 10" iPad with dual e-ink and full color, with their characteristic award winning industrial design we all love.
Just imagine that.
Now, imagine Apple finally delivering a 10" iPad with dual e-ink and full color, with their characteristic award winning industrial design we all love.
Just imagine that.
First, that Kindle killer isn't even close to existing.
Second, if you think $400 is steep for a device that has a 1 second refresh rate and a gray-scale screen, just wait until you see the price tag on 10" of full-color, touchscreen, iInk.
Third, and the real barrier to entry, Amazon has the bookstore to back it up. You can make the finest e-book reader in the world, but until you have "magic" wireless delivery and a limitless library to back it up, it's considerably more inconvenient to use than the Kindle.
Apple will not crack this space. It will have to be Google or Microsoft.
The Kindle is not an end in itself. The store's the thing. Kind of opposite from the iPhone ecosystem, where the store exists to sell the phone.
Done right, a device like this could rule the living room!
PS: Amazon does not think of it's self as a book store as much as a large tech company. It's trying to create large margine markets like the kindel not just sell more books. And they have great brand recognision to build off of.
The people using the kindle just want it to work (this is why Bezos worked out the deal with Sprint).
Have you ever tried walking grandma (Who is a memeber of one of the major groups the kindle is aimed at: The elderly) through setting up her ipod? Then transferring songs to it?
Can you imagine walking the same person through the steps required to convert whatever file it is she wants to view on her reader, how to plug the USB cable in, what hole it goes in, what buttons to press, when to press them, what it all means, where the books are, how to find them on her harddisk etc. etc. etc.
The kindle is good because it is simple. If you don't want that, get an old palm pilot or a nokia 770 (which is what I used before I got my kindle...palm back in early 2000 and nokia up until about a year ago).
That kind of thing in consumer-level devices will lead to cheap, very high-res, nearly page-quality devices you can fit in a pocket.
Also, if you don't limit yourself to the primary use-case of the Kindle, you don't need the resources of the Amazon bookstore to back it up. A better form-factor for people to take information that they collate will have a lot of users. I can think of a variety of such uses for myself. I would be able to carry my entire library of sheet music with me for reference. I would be able to have an entire library of programming language manuals with me, whether or not I was online.
There are lots of kinds of books other than paperbacks. Kindle is oriented towards one specific use case.
--the whole point of these screens, is that they can be made using existing LCD screen manufacturing technology, with some number of tweaks. There have been billions upon billions already spent on LCD screen manufacturing facilities.
The e-ink process on the other hand, does not have that kind of scale and ability to spread costs over a very high number of units.