Quote:
Originally Posted by Kolenka
The catch is that new technologies that do something drastically different take more time to mature. Look at the computer itself. It took 20-30 years to develop into something that you could even fit into your home. Another 10 to become mass-produced, another 10 shrink into something like a laptop, and another 10 to move into the ultra-portable space (the stuff smaller than a deck of cards we have today).
LCDs like are used today started back in 1972. It took 20 years to make it into products the consumer could buy and hook up to a computer (roughly). Another 10 to become cheap enough to completely replace the CRT.
The difference here is that a new display tech took 10 years to go from concept to real product. That's not bad. They found a market that can fund the development of the technology. That it was more mainstream than the market for a mainframe + a few dozen dumb terminals is also huge.
Integrated Circuits were absolutely huge, and involved 10+ years of work to produce transistors that allows consumer electronics to function, let alone the extra work that took that and developed it into a way to create the silicon circuits required for ICs.
So keep in mind that there has been a pretty big struggle behind a lot of the major developments that drove advances in electronics and computing.
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The thing about ebook readers is that much of the technology for producing them is available. Software for rendering high-quality text has been around for a long time. Yes, the displays will be a bit slow to develop, but there are many other areas of development in the reader space that have gone ignored, even though the software and hardware have been around for quite a while. At a fundamental level, they're glorified text viewers...and the newest Sony readers still do not have real italics. That is just pathetic.
Apologists can try to vindicate the lack of development with excuses regarding financial viability, but as a consumer, I don't care.