Quote:
Originally Posted by karunaji
Sometimes to be late in the market is more advantageous.
We don't need a compelling platform for e-books, we need convenient and easily applicable standards.
It is expected that e-ink prices will fall in 1 or 2 years. I base this prognosis on the fact that Russia and other countries are building e-ink screen factories. It may even lead to overproduction thus falling prices. Thus E-ink readers may become as ubiquitous as cheap mobile phones are today in India or China.
But e-book market will flourish with cheaper devices.
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Uh, I may be mis-reading your intent but you sound as if you think the value of ebook readers lies in the hardware *alone*.
In that case, yes; arriving late to market with me-too generic products would result in great success. That applies to entry level cellphones and dvd players but, unfortunately, *NOT* to the commercial ebook business.
If cheap "standard" hardware were the key to success in ebook readers the horde of cheap chinese Adobe-ADEPT LCD readers flooding ebay would rule the ebook world instead of barely being footnotes.
But, as it turns out, ebook readers, are *NOT* about the hardware at *all*. Focusing on the hardware misses the point completely; ebook readers are about providing *access* to ebooks. As a result, ebook readers do *not* best compare to entry-level cellphones but rather to other content delivery vehicles like gaming consoles.
And the "compelling platform" is in fact pretty much the key to mainstream success.
Focusing on hardware as a source of the product value's neglects the value-add from the device's software, its support network, and its commercial ebookstore. Just cranking out cheap hardware runnning quickie ports of open source, DRM-free readers or Adobe's generic ADE might be adequate for hobbyists and techies and is not a bad way to seed a market but to reach beyond the early adopter/enthusiast niche and get to the mainstream consumer requires better-integrated products with more sophisticated software and backend services.
The situation in Germany and other european nations reflects a variety of factors, some cultural, some political, some economic, and some... some due to the fact that the bulk of the available readers are sold with barely a nod to after sale concerns and no significant support infrastructure that would ensure mainstream readers can effectively use the gadgets to their fullest. Most are in fact limited to use solely as PC Peripherals, which right there excludes a significant portion of the potential market.
The most successful mainstream-user readers are those that people can turn on, buy a book, and just read. No need to know what format the book is in, no need to tweak settings, no need to decompile the book, rewrite a CSS, and recompile the book. No need to keep track of device authorizations or whether their PC can even see the reader.
I *own* those kinds of readers.
And yes, they are "successful" in Asia and other areas.
If by success you mean sales by the tens of thousands a month.
Kindles, Kobos, and Nooks sell by the hundreds of thousands a month; Kindle is doing over a million a month right about now.
And the reason these western readers are successful at those volumes even at current hardware prices is because their vendors are selling ebooks, not hardware. They put their efforts into improving the software, making the firmware rock-solid stable and as crash-proof as humanly possible, and extending the reach of their ebookstore networks.
For those readers, the hardware is but the tip of the iceberg.
The bulk of the value lies in the unseen software and support areas.
When ebook readers offer a compelling story on those issues, *that* is when they are ready to reach out to mainstream consumers, who simply want to *read*.
BTW, you mention Russia and the far east. Yes, those are very different "culturally" and the idea of what constitutes a commercial ebook is very different round those parts. That may be the situation forever. Or it might not.
It is my understanding that one of the more popular reader lines are the POCKETBOOK series. I own two separate models. They... seem to be having issues of late.
Their efforts to expand by focusing on (very good) hardware, releasing five separate new model simultaneously seems to have left them with a lot on their plate trying to get those back-end software and support and stability issues under control. Hopefully they will and soon. But I worry because this kind of over-reach has happened before in other industries and it rarely ends well.
It is very early in the history of ebooks and there's no telling how things will stabilize but certain lessons are clear from the past few years.
And the biggest lesson so far is that hardware is secondary to the software and both are secondary to the *books*. Don't expect cheap generic "standard" hardware to be with us much longer as anything but a niche product, if that much.
The real winners will be those that build solid reading *platforms* and those may be global players or local players but what they won't be is hardware-only.