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No one's making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback....
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Here, I find I agree with him. Not on the paperback price thing, I think $100 would be sufficiently low for them to really gain acceptance, assuming there weren't any artificial bars in play, like DRM and format disputes.
I've long thought that in order to get e-ink costs down a
professional device is needed. Something that can display A4/Letter sized pages, and handle hand written annotations -- even if it were still not color -- would be a big hit to professions that are highly paper intensive.
For example:
Legal: they handle
ridiculous amounts of text on a daily basis. Much of it comes to them as PDF files, which they print out, mark up, use for a few days and then toss. The cost of even a $2k device would be recouped there pretty quickly in paper and toner.
Medical: those not involved with hospitals probably don't realize it, but there is a massive push to make medical records electronic.
Every single day the hospital I work for
scans in a stack of pages over
six feet high! They save them as .TIFF files, if you can believe it -- they won't comment on how many terrabytes that adds up to each day, but I digress. If the forms they used were electronic in the first place, the devices that let them do it would pay for themselves in a matter of
days.
Education: Probably mainly in higher education, this one. Being able to receive, grade, and return assignments purely in electronic format would be a huge boon to any teacher/professor who handles much in the way of grading (most of them, I expect). They wouldn't be recouping costs all that much, but they'd have a lot of added benefits from it. One of the biggest would be being able to keep a copy of the graded work while still returning it to the students (this can be a big deal). Another would be being able to make use of services like
TurnItIn (it's a plagiarism check service), without assuming the burden of printing the assignments themselves.
Those are just the low-hanging fruit. I'd expect that pretty much every business of a certain size has at least a few people for whom such a device would be worthwhile. And of course every CEO and CIO would have to have one, just to show they were important enough to rate one.
It's pretty established that people will spend more on business related things than on personal ones. This is how microcomputer prices came down as they did: businesses bought enough of them that the economies of scale kicked in, and now they're a household appliance.
One of the present obstacles to these notional professional e-ink devices is that no one (read: PVI, since they're the
only ones) is making panel that large. I think that if someone offered them a big enough contract for A4 panels, they'd somehow figure out how to make them. It would have to be someone with sufficient R&D funds to throw at the thing to catch their attention, so we're probably talking someone like HP or, yes, Sony -- heck, if Palm is looking for a "third line" of products, here's a dandy one for them to consider, it would certainly fit well with their other products.
