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I have a new neighbor who moved in recently and she was telling me that she reads as much as she can on her Kindle but it bothers her eyes and she does the rest of her reading with used paperbacks. Then she showed me her Kindle and it turns out to be a 10" Fire tablet. She thought that was a Kindle ereader.
Amazon created that problem when the called the first Fire the Kindle Fire. That caused a lot of confusion and the next generation was simply the Fire tablet. But even in this forum full of knowledgeable people it's still called a Kindle Fire almost as much as it's called a Fire tablet. I've called it that myself a few times without thinking.
I think this points to part of the reason e-ink hasn't been a rising star recently: people don't really know about it. When they think of a Kindle they think of whatever Amazon device they've seen and that's probably a Fire more often than not. Even professional tech reviewers refer to e-ink readers as having backlights. People don't know.
Another reason is that a lot of people are perfectly happy reading on their phone or a tablet. A lot of people are bothered by reading on a backlit device but I think a lot more aren't. Others read on tablets such as the Fire or the Ipad.
I think another reason is that there's a kind of spiritual backlash: people saying they love the smell of rotting paper, etc.
And of course there's the highly dishonest marketing being done by the publishers to promote paper books and show how ebooks are falling behind. Publishers as used car salesmen! They're having an effect. They make more money with paper. They've been fighting ebooks from the start.
So what! Ebooks on e-ink makes more sense in a culture that mostly reads novels and in an environment where cutting down trees to make paper is detrimental to the environment.
For most of the world ebooks began with the first Kindle in 2007, 11 years ago. I'm not sure cars caught on as fast as ereaders have. I'm pretty sure airplanes didn't. I just looked at a chart of ereader sales which spiked in 2011 selling almost 4 times as many as in 2010. Since then their sales have been declining but not nearly as much as tablet sales.
They're still selling over 20 million ereaders worldwide every year and that's a lot.
Barry
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