Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
I remember seeing stats on overall readership, the % of people who read no book in previous year was pretty high. So there is a saturation point for dedicated ereaders.
I hope this spurs eink to improve on the pearl display. Better contrast, please.
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While there may be some improvements to be made there, say by getting a whiter background, I'm not sure that kind of incremental improvement makes the most economic sense if the North American market is in fact leveling off.
If we are indeed approaching an inflection point in the tech adoption curve, and not just looking at a pronounced seasonal effect compounded by a bit of holiday cannnibalization by the new reader/tablets, it will take more of a generational improvement to get growth back to the extremely high rates of the past two years. So putting development efforts into getting video-grade refresh or higher indor color saturation, or both, is going to result in a higher return than just a better B&W contrast ratio.
The next generation eink has to start appealing at more than just recreational narrative text readers, either by going after the academic or corporate markets, or providing a better experience for periodicals. There's more money to be made, I think, in lighter and cheaper large format readers and in color; ideally, both. A Triton II that offered LCD-grade color on a lighter device with multi-day battery life is more likely to bring in casual readers and other fence-sitters into the game than a slightly better B&W, no matter how cheap.
Easy sales just on access to ebooks are going to be lower for a while. The time looks about right for *cheap* color eink readers to start ramping up.