Quote:
Originally Posted by jocampo
Hans,
How's the market in Taiwan for tablets and eink readers? In other words , which one is the leader there on each market....
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E-ink never was very popular here because
1 -- very few Chinese language books were available. (Simplified Chinese books from the darknet over in China offer more choices, but with atrociously bad formatting and a high risk of catching viruses. And illegal downloading is not main stream. Besides, those books are from mainland authors, only).
2 -- Pbooks are quite cheap and a lot of people use bookstores as libraries (meaning they walk in, take a book from the shelves, sit down and read it)
3 -- most e-ink readers need tweaking to display Chinese fonts (except for PDF files which do not display well on small screens). Tablets, of course, don't have this problem.
Lately a few new online bookstores have appeared and BenQ has a new e-ink reader with bookstore.
The iPad sells well, but is generally only used for browsing and media. You see the Galaxy tab on display everywhere, too. As are local brands like Gigabyte and Viewsonic. Archos as well. No idea how well they sell.
The most important factor will be making books available at prices that can compete with pbooks. As we all know publishers are not very keen on pushing ebooks, so it things may change slowly. Taiwanese people read a lot and are gadget friendly, so the market would be there.