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Originally Posted by drachasor
... does anyone else think it might just be better to wait until next year?
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Personally, I'm going to wait to decide until September -- by then, there should be a kind of consensus if the iLiad is good enough for its cost, if the PDF reader can take severe stress, as well as if iRex is good enough.
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Originally Posted by drachasor
Afterall, flexible screens are coming, and eink has already developed a color display
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The question is, I think: when are eInk displays getting larger? I haven't found any info on how large the actual display of the iLiad is, but from the photos and the device size info it 'feels' as if it is about 15-20 mm short of the typical pocket book page height. That makes it trickier to adapt existing pages to the device, and so may add cost for contents publishers -- the next step is very probably a display that covers some reasonable subset of standard book formats.
The next step beyond that would be A4 or letter size, as that would target a lot of technical documentation -- this is what a lot of large tech companies are today, and there are huge potential sales in this area.
Flexible screens and colour are, I think, mainly for news publishers, but that's on the other hand where a large number of buyers are, though far more difficult to sell to. Flexible readers will require very good user interfaces ... I suspect at least five years before these are reasonably useful: the first generation will almost certainly be ghastly, as well as be riddled with all kinds of branding and DRM problems: the end-user will probably buy a device through a publisher ... will it work for competitive contents?
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Originally Posted by drachasor
Of course, I have to acknowledge that if nobody buys todays models then next years models might not exist.
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And no-one is going to buy iLiad unless it's useful. Single buyers are probably not important here: it will be the contents providers (today's B2B customers) who sell the device. But if they get all protective, and refuse anyone elses contents on their rebranded devices ...