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Old 03-10-2017, 10:45 AM   #44
fjtorres
Grand Sorcerer
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John F View Post
The Kobo 6" devices are dull, though. The Kindles have 300dpi, different types of buttons, different form factors, different ergonomics, ...
Amazon can afford to experiment, go after premium niches, throw money into Liquavista in case they can make the tech viable.

Kobo is pretty much at the mercy of what eInk can squeeze out of their electrophoretic tech. Which seems to be tapped out. Also, the Kobo brand isn't big enough to support much market segmentation. Doing too many variants risks reducing the economies of scale that make current models profitable.

There's a tendency to forget that manufacturing costs scale inversely with market volume and the mainstream market has not yet shown much interest in alternate or larger reading devices. It's not purely a chicken and egg thing because larger formats do exist but, like plastic backplanes, either the demand or the manufacturing capacity (or both) aren't there. I suspect eInk simply can't make enough variant panels at a price that makes sense for Kobo, even as a premium device.
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