[John Bailey]

Originally Posted by DD1509

Are you kidding? It is not about hardware. The question was what will it do for eBook pricing and availability.

And I still say .. Nothing..

Hardware defines what the software can do. The iPhone OS may very well be cut to the bone, but unless computers have changed a great deal, you still need to have a given amount of power to do a given amount of work in a given amount of time. So the single application that this device can run will be limited to what power is available. Plenty of oomph for an e-book reader(My Cybook only has a 400Mhz processor), but not so much for a word processor or for opening a graphics heavy PDF or whatever.

It will do a great things. It will add a huge buying force for books in another store. It will open more doors for eBooks, acceptance, standardization and will create more competition!!!

And end world hunger and fix global warming.. and make all right with the world. Sorry.. I don't swallow it. How will it add huge buying force when every book will more than likely come from the Apple iTunes store? A subset of already available books that are easily bought elsewhere.

PLUS it will single-handedly bring more users to ebooks than are here now.

Would these be the e-book users that balk at paying $200 for an e-book reader? In which case they will certainly be forming lines around the block for one two and a half times the price. And paying for PD books in app form.. Hell.. I bet they will all buy three. And the case and the keyboard,and half a dozen docking stations, and the USB dongle and the SD card dongle, and the lunch box.

This device is going to sell millions!! And will likely sell many millions of ebooks. More authors and publishers will be forced to include their works as eBooks.

No doubt. But millions are not really that big any more. And of those millions, how many will use it mostly as a video watching device or a web surfing device? It might get the text book mob to finally shut up about e-ink being rubbish, but if the video I saw today is anything to go by, the page turn animation takes about as much time as the screen blanking update on my Cybook.

As I mentioned in another post you will likely see e-Ink go away. It won't be very fast but unless e-ink and the current eReader manufacturers can drive the prices down to the magic sub-$100 category, the color and backlighting is going to be very hard stay away from.

I thought that was supposed to be PixelQi.. The great e-ink killer from the last few months? And all the other new and yet to be released technologies that were the death of the e-ink reader.

Slight flaw with your prediction.. Despite the iPod being available for ten years or so, lots of other players are freely available on the market. Some have little LCD non backlit displays, some are memory stick shaped, some have video, some even surf the web. iProducts have not, despite the assurances of Apple fans, taken over.

You may very well be wetting your self in anticipation of a colour device, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not planning to buy one for at least another three years. At which time, I'll go for another non backlit device if at all possible. And I think there are enough like minded people to keep e-book readers selling well enough to make a profit.

You should also guess that within 1 year from today there will be at least 6-12 more color tablets hit the market and then the prices will fall. Most of the tablet people will read some books on it even if the main draw is web and other media.

Oh I'm not going to guess. Because I already know. There are quite a few ARM based sub-netbooks on the horizon. I'll be watching very closely. I'm hoping someone brings out at least one with a 7 inch wide screen clamshell design. Just right for replacing my PDA. With a custom Linux OS and a nice little community around it. And I very much doubt any will have e-ink. Colour or not.

If they are smart, many will be tablets. this is where the Linux netbooks went wrong. No imagination in the form factor design,so people expected little laptops, and expected the little laptops to run Windows. But these sub-netbooks, no matter the form factor, will be much cheaper and possibly faster than Apple's over priced sales device. With any luck, it might even give Adobe the nudge to port it's e-book software to Linux.

What they will be very likely to be is a quarter the price of the iPad. And will sell just about everywhere as cheap portable computers that can do useful stuff as well as play Youtube and other flash video streaming sites, and have removable storage. Some with wifi, some with 3G. It's all good.

It is so NOT about hardware or feeds-and-speeds.

No.. You are absolutely right. It's about marketing and shiny things and stupid people who buy a brand instead of a device. Nike have been sucking money from them for years.

But it's also about being fit for purpose. And I don't want to read my novels on a backlit screen, and I certainly don't want to spend nearly £500 for one.