Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
And therein lies the crux of the matter. You're going to buy it. Good God Almighty, at $499 my dog is going to buy it. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but the point is that most people who like to just surf around the web and whatnot and don't really need a full-blown laptop are going to want this sort of device. It's perfect for that kind of computing. Talking about people buying this device solely to read books is totally missing the point: a vast number of people are going to purchase vast numbers of this thing for vast amounts of reasons. The reasons don't matter at all; they're completely irrelevant. The point is that vast numbers of people are going to buy this thing, and that is what is going to kill the e-ink reader market. Because everyone who buys it, regardless of why they bought it, will be able to read books on it in a way that they couldn't with their iPhones or Palms or Blackberries, and for 98% of those people, that will be good enough. Of the huge numbers of Joe Consumers out there, how many of them will drop $500 to $900 on an iPad and then drop another $300 to $600 on an e-ink based e-reader? Any moron can tell you that very, very few people are going to do that. And that's your problem right there. There won't be enough fanatics buying $400 e-ink readers in addition to the iPad to make sales of e-ink readers robust enough to keep businesses like iRex viable.
Look at any ePub book on the market today. Even the best ePubs look horrible compared to a professionally typeset book. Yet you have many, many people reading ebooks today who have dropped hundreds of dollars on their ereaders and, astoundingly, are willing to accept extremely poor typesetting on their incredibly expensive devices. It's ironic in the extreme, but it proves the point: people are willing to accept anything that is "good enough," so long as it's convenient. For 98% of the market for the iPad, which absolutely will include 98% of anyone who is a gadget freak enough to want an e-reader in the first place, reading their books on a LCD with the brightness turned down will be good enough, and that simple fact of human psychology will completely destroy the e-ink e-reader market. There simply won't be enough fanatics who will be willing to lug both an iPad and an e-reader around when the iPad will be good enough, so sales of those expensive e-ink devices will plummet, meaning that you, even though you are in the minority who would be willing to have both kinds of devices, simply won't be able to find one on sale anywhere to buy.
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I'm sorry, but if you read your posts carefully, you will see that the second paragraph is little more than a restatement of the first, and as such not a little redundant. I realise this information seems to affect you quite strongly, but I really don't get what all the fuss is about. People will buy what they want anyway. Keeping the market artificially devoid of competing devices seems a fairly strange solution to the problem of the 'smaller devices that can be used to read on comfortably' product group.
Personally, I find the notion that people will spend $500-900 on a device like this, plus 30$ monthly for 2 years to AT&T, just a little ridiculous. While netbooks have certainly become popular lately, they seem comparable in functionality (save the touchscreen), but they also start at a far lower price point than this iPad thing will, and those things aren't quite ubiquitous yet either.
The only thing I would like to reiterate towards iRex is that they should really work to add annotation support back in, as it's one of the best features of their other products, and the single feature that made me buy the iLiad.
You keep talking as though the world only contains a single type of customer, whereas if only 0.5% of the world's (internet) users are interested in a device like the DR800/1000/iLiad, you have a potential market of 5-35 million people.