Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
Features tend to get cheaper the longer they're available. Power locks used to add thousands of dollars to a car's price, now they're a few hundred, I could list supporting examples for this for a long, long time before I ran out of them.  |
I bought a new car here the other day. Mine is silver.
Maybe I paid just for the power door locks? It came to 36,800 yuan, plus road tax and insurance. That translates to US$4,853.92.
Now this car has a nice fit and finish, a five-speed transmission, radio-tape player, air conditioning, airbags and power door locks and windows that lock up nicely when I press the little button on the key.
So if Chery motors can produce a peppy little auto like this (very reminiscent of my Suzuki Swift I had in the US) for the price of a high-end laptop, maybe a savvy Chinese electronics firm can whip something together in a plastic case, with a low-cost screen and have us all reading happily for just lunch money.
If we don't wait for cheap EP displays, it can happen soon. If we really want Eink, we can wait until the price of EP displays comes way down, because it will.
In other posts here I mentioned
the MP4 player I used as a reader. My cost was about US$50! With a few firmware changes (a non-recurring development expense), it would be a passable reader. Trade the music circuitry for a slightly larger display and we have -- the Kindle? Or maybe the uKindle.
And let us not forget the
eBookwise-1150. The base model is going for US$110 plus shipping.
People say it is a good eReader. What are the production costs? I would guess about one third of retail -- or less.
Filament Books will give you one for free, if only you join their book club for a year!
A company like Amazon would be very smart to sponsor the development of a rock-bottom device and run something like Mobipocket on it. If you saw a blister pack in Barnes and Noble that offered an eReader and two popular eBooks, and it was priced at the normal cost of the two hardcover novels alone, would you jump at it?
Great googley-moogley, we're almost there!