Quote:
Originally Posted by Conan46
E-ink will be gone in 10 years. Better phone and tablet screens, and better battery life will completely replace them. They have already begun to do so.
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Phones will have better screens and battery life will be great, but that’s missing the primary advantage of e-readers.
Reflective (rather than emissive) screens are still pretty niche, and have low response/refresh rates. But they’re massively better for reading.
I expect that both types of screens will continue to improve apace, and emissive screens (which are far worse for e-reading, but better for videos and gaming) will still be much faster in 10 years. And most phones and tablets will continue to use emissive screens that are better for the majority of use-cases, but not a good replacement for e-readers.
Eventually the two will merge, but that’ll be a lot further down the line than 10 years—10 years ago, everyone thought color e-ink would dominate the market by now, and it’s still got almost zero penetration.
It’s tough to tell where the market moves faster than we think it will, and where it moves slower. But reading doesn’t seem to be a huge growth market, and the needs of dedicated reading devices are still a niche. A reasonably large niche that can drive a small market, but not a niche that will influence phone/tablet/etc designs to a huge degree.