[SensualPoet]

I've only had the privilege of going to CES once -- the year HD DVD got clobbered, literally, on the eve of the show when Sony did a nearly $1 billion deal behind the scenes with Warner, among others. By an extraordinary fluke, I spent an evening with the Microsoft execs who had been blind-sided by Sony's last-minute tactics. How appropriate such a huge corporate gamble was played out at Las Vegas!

CES is an amazing event: you get to see all kinds of tech stuff just released, almost released, and in prototype (or less) and pick the brains of the presenters and attendees with so much riding on the right conversation with the right person. I really feel for our friends here online at Mobileread from Astak, as example. The right deal: glory. The wrong deal, or no deal: catastrophe. And everything spun completely out of proportion by the press.

And so it was with e-readers, based on what one could glean from afar, this past January at CES and the important other trade shows like Cebit in Hannover and Computex in Taipei. So many irons in the fire ... and the looming presence of iPad ready for late April release. I am willing to bet that dampened many deals, not least of which were those surrounding Microsoft Windows 7 tablets that got skunked by fear of Apple.

The thing is, we now know what iPad is and air is returning to the market and suddenly we have a new e-ink Pearl screen exclusive to one vendor; a mess of Android tablets ready to flood the market in the fall; the closure of a half dozen e-reader wannabees and a dozen more that never launched. Anyone who blinked, who said "let's wait and see", will be shown to have lost.

At this point, the big electronic dealers like Best Buy have signed their deals for now through the end of 2010. Those buyers know what's coming and there isn't room for someone new to arrive with "the next best thing". The factories are engaged and starting to churn out the goods that will be in-store for Sep and Oct. This is another reason Amazon's announcement of the Kindle 3 -- pretty much at the last possible moment from a manufacturing point of view relative to 2010 Q4 sales -- has been so strategic. Like great comedy, timing is everything. If we get to the end of August, without a definitive counter-strike by B&N, Sony, Kobo or others, the only alternative they have will be simply to drop the price. Or get out of the way.