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Originally Posted by jbenny
Regarding the statistic that the average person only reads six books a year (if that is really accurate): That number may be true if you are only counting fiction books, or what is on the Best Seller list. However, I think that a lot of people are missing one important point. Even the average person reads quite a bit of other material in the course of a year--magazines, newspapers, work-related documentation, etc.
An e-reader device that could easily handle all of these "other" e-texts, as well as e-books, would find a much wider market. Of course, it would have to be brain-dead simple to get all of this different content onto the device. It would also have to be inexpensive. The economy of scale that a large market brings will help with price...
...Speaking of MP3 players, devices like the iPod and similar players prove that lots of people are indeed willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a gadget, if they either perceive it as the latest "cool" thing, or they can find some value in it. Think about it--when did everyone decide that being able to listen to music (or audiobooks) any time and any place was something they had to have?
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I don't think the reader has to be that cheap... if it proves to be able to provide a valuable service to the user, they'll pay for it, just as people paid premium for iPods over other, cheaper MP3 players because of the features iPods offered. (For readers, I've discussed these in other threads, such as article and image saving and retrieval, etc.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MaggieScratch
Maybe it's just me, then...I like the portability of reading on a PDA/smartphone but my eyes can't take it. I am waiting on the Cybook Gen3 and the Kindle to choose an eink reader (might end up with the Sony, who knows?). I can see that becoming my everyday device, though I'll keep books on my Treo as backup.
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Some people are good with smaller readers and LCD screens... some demand e-ink... and some can read on their PCs all day long. What's important is that they all have something to read on whatever they've got!