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Originally Posted by jswinden
Quite true. But the same principle aplies to text books. There is a very limited market for any text book. Therefore the price is astronomical compared to books of the same size targeted to a popular (much larger) audience. Let's examine the DX and text books. About this time last year the DX was touted and marketed as the best digital reader for university students to read text books on. Did that market really advance beyond a niche market? No. Would an even larger and more expensive device out sell the DX or DXG in the university student niche market? I doubt it would even come close to the number of DXes sold in that same niche market. Students don't have money. I was a grad student once, I nearly starved! Their professors and scientist do have money to spend on such devices, but they represent a very small percentage of the buyers who purchase digital readers. If I was Amazon, I sure wouldn't put out a Kindle for such a small niche market. The DXG is already pushing the size and weight envelope near it's limit, anything beyond that and I doubt many buyers would purchase it.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by paperwastage
well, is the screensize of the DX twice the size of the K2?
DX is a niche product, probably with only the iPad and entourage Edge as competitors.... as such, it can be priced higher
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Kinda get tired of the over use of the term "niche product" here...please define this for me? Then go to Amazon and determine the sheer number of books formatted specifically for large format readers...there are THOUSANDS of them, covering many areas of interest. Everything from technical manuals, especially technical or reference manuals, to general interest content...hardly my definition of a "niche product". As I read the use of "niche product" in this thread, the term seems to imply a "vertical market" product appealing to a very narrow market in specific area(s). Given the number as well as breadth of large panel formatted content I take a different view of the large panel device as a small narrow vertical market, or "niche", device.
I think the main reason we are not seeing larger format devices just yet is the panel tech is not ready to handle fragile layers glass w/o breaking fairly easily. We will likely see them in pretty robust numbers once the flexible plastic panels come out in mass production quantities late this year or next year. Even just going by the current number of books formatted for large panel devices, the market for them is LARGE and far from a niche in nature. And that is before there are genuinely large EPD panel devices out there. To get a real useful large panel device right now the only real option is a tablet/slate PC of some sort or use your ill suited laptop or desktop 16:9 format LCD...maybe we need the return of rotating LCD panels like we had 20yrs back?
