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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yeah, no.  I disagree that the technology is flailing miserably.
• Epaper is far more difficult to design and build than you suspect. The overwhelming majority of infrastructure to build displays is oriented towards LCD's, and getting epaper anywhere near the refresh rates of LCD's is extremely difficult. As a result, it has a much smaller market.
• The devices are consistently improving -- often just via firmware updates. They're getting smaller and lighter; connectivity options are increasing; speed is improving; battery life is growing; availability of commercial ebooks is booming; sales are up; the industry is expending more and more energy on ebooks. Heck, even some of the proofreading has improved slightly in the past year. Oh, and in case you didn't notice, prices have dropped dramatically over the past 18 months. That alone is a huge benefit.
As to the corporate comments, someone is always going to kvetch about whoever is ruling the roost at the moment. In the heyday of paper it was Barnes & Noble, who allegedly drove numerous independent bookstores and smaller chains out of business, and terrified the industry with its attempt to purchase Ingram. Amazon came out of nowhere and was the underdog, now that they've body-checked B&N it's their turn to be the Bad Guy. If Sony had the biggest market share, I'm sure someone would throw a temper tantrum every time they made a customer service misstep.
I concur that some things can always benefit from improvement, and there will be more advances very soon. However for a lot of types of reading, ebooks are fully usable right now -- which is why I've barely read any paper books in the past year or so. |
I agree. I'd add that when looking at this sort of issue you have to be careful about using the word "market". There are different markets with different but overlapping requirements. North America is not the same as Europe or the rest of the planet, consumer use is not the same as business use is not the same as professional or academic use.
For example I doubt any work environment would allow the attempted monopolistic Amazon and Apple approaches to be used - handling content control and device access to a remote shopkeeper is a recipe for disaster.
Technology typically improves incrementally and while I would like a colour, large format Epaper based reader I am willing to compromise for a while as current technologies are perfectly adequate for some of what I need.