Quote:
Originally Posted by binaryhermit
History lesson: The first kindle sold for $400 IIRC
These days, you can get a fully tricked out Oasis (32 GB, Cellular connectivity), which is the most expensive current-gen kindle for $349.99 directly from Amazon.
Also, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th gens, and so on tend to get better and more reliable as technology matures and the bugs get found and fixed. If folding gadgets stick around long enough to happen, they might become an actual thing.
But, what I meant to say in this thread, the price is high, the benefits to me are low, and the technology screams "fragile" to me. And I'm hard on my belongings. So I'm out for now(EDIT: I mean on the tech, not necessarily the thread).
EDITED TO ADD: There's also this video of a folding ereader from a trade show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-kYQ61A-s4
But I suspect that's more of a tech demo than a product, I think, and it's over a year and a half old. |
Oh, I don't doubt somebody will try it.
But just as with large format and color eink readers they will be more tech demo than mainstream product. Price is only part of it but, sure, a $400 folding screen reader would sell. Not in massive numbers but it might be a viable premium product. But what about at $800? $1200? Today's premium "candy bar" phones run in that range-- the foldables won't be any cheaper.
Look at the Sony and Pocketbook large format eink readers. Seen many in the wild? Who buys them? What for? Not ebook reading. Typically they're productivity tools for corporations for viewing large format documents like blueprints. And they're priced accordingly. The cheapest large format Sony runs in the $600 range. If it's still around at all. It hardly set the world afire.
Some technologies are solutions in search of problems: few find one. eInk managed to find a decent-sized niche in cheap, paperback-class dedicated reading devices. But it has since struggled to find viable markets for its many variants. They keep trying but they keep running into the same problem as most non-LCD display technologies: volume pricing. It's a chicken-n-egg problem. They need volume sales to get prices down but they can't get prices down until they're selling in high volume.
The original Sony and Kindle readers sold for $400 but look at the volumes. Amazon only ordered 25,000 of those Kindles because that's the rate at which early ereaders sold: by the thousand, not by the million. As late as 2011, when prices were under $200, Cool-er could feel proud to have sold 25,000 in a year. At the time, Sony was moving maybe 200,000 units a year and Pocketbook 100,000 and they were the big boys outside the US.
It wasn't until after the 4 hour price war and the exit of most of the hardware-only players, when prices dropped to $100 and under that ereaders started selling by the million. And getting there kicked Sony and most of hardware-only vendors out of the US market. It also sent Nook into it's ongoing death-spiral.
Dedicated ebook readers are a niche product and a relatively small one at that. It's not big enough to support the development cost of new technologies or even new variant products, just incremental tweaks in packaging and lighting.
I wouldn't hold my breath for even a modest volume of folding devices based on eink. Based on LCD? Maybe. But they won't be $400 cheap. Not soon. If ever. By the time folding displays are cheap enough to go into ereaders they'll be going into multifunction tablets are higher volumes and lower prices.
It's not a matter of consumer preference as much as it's the economics.