Quote:
Originally Posted by brecklundin
Parents think nothing of spending $50/mo for a cell phone for the child..why not make a reader device available for like $100 with completely free readers for lower income folks. These could be used the whole time they are in say high school. Not sure about lower then that as, seriously, they kids are more computer literate then the teachers.
|
It's a lovely idea, that founders on costs.
Consider the OLPC effort. The original coal was to create a laptop that would cost $100. They couldn't. The current price is twice that.
It might be theoretically possible to produce a dedicated ebook reader for $100.
Semiconductor electronics is the classic capital intensive business. The raw materials are fairly cheap, but the factories that make the components are fantastically expensive. The majority of the cost of the components of such things is debt service on the financing to build the factories that make the parts.
Semiconductor fabs cost so much that we are seeing more outfits shifting to a "fabless" model, where they create the design and contract with someone else to manufacture, and even huge companies like Intel, IBM, and Texas Instruments entering into joint ventures with other entities on manufacturing because the costs are astronomical and getting more so as the technology advances.
You can make your widgets cheap if you make a zillion of them, because you can spread the allocated overhead incurred in making them over many more units, so the overhead becomes a progressively smaller part of the price you have to charge. The problem is, you have to make and sell a zillion.
Current dedicated ebook readers are comparatively expensive because the manufacturers don't have that sort of economy of scale.
To be able to offer these things for $100 (or free to low income folks), someone would have to commit to making a
lot of them, to get the unit costs down to that level. Who will do it? And more to the point, who will
fund it?
I don't see this happening.
______
Dennis