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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
It's a mistake to count on the same e-paper technologies be the only ones available as well. And you used the word "ever" - I'm just looking two decades ahead, at most. Readers, especially touchscreen readers, are useful for a whole host of things beside traditional reading as well.
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Agreed, but we still disagree on the price point such devices might achieve.
I'm looking forward to newer display technologies. One show stopper for me in getting a reader is that eInk does not currently support color, and color is a requirement for my uses. (I've seen some items on prototype eInk displays using 12 bit color. I was not impressed.)
I expect interesting things to be out in the next few years, but I don't expect to see them all that cheap.
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And... you're making that mistake yourself - people read more than ever, but not necessarily novels. A tablet for the web is going to be a major, if not the major, platform. Also...sure, there are a few things which won't translate well, but future releases in that sort of unwieldy format? Well, they're few and far between already.
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I repeat what I said, and I was
not thinking of just novels. While it's all reading, I put reading books, fiction or non-fiction, in a different category from browsing the web.
A tablet as an expansion of current netbook devices is something I can see being a major success. But that's a general purpose device, not a dedicated reader. (And that's another show stopper for me in getting a reader: I need a device that does more than display books.)
The initial question was whether a dedicated reader at a $99 price point would be compelling enough to make ereaders mainstream and make hardcover books go away. I don't see either happening near term. (And I'm certainly not going to get two reader devices, one to replace PBs and the other to replace HCs. I'll get one portable multipurpose device that will display ebooks among other functions, and pass on a dedicated reader entirely.)
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Dennis