Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeOnyx
These are great suggestions. However another question would be, realistically, how much are you willing to pay for such a device or like to see the retail price of the device to be?
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You're right to ask how much forum members might pay for their ideal device. The features and quality of a reader need to be matched with price to be meaningful.
I see some large numbers posted by folks with Euros. I would not pay over $300 for a reader.
A low price market entrant
Delstar just came out with a
color reader called
Openbook that sold [sells] at Walgreens for
$99 on sale. Its' HW looks great. Its'
SW wasn't nearly ready. They didn't support DRM. They didn't have a tie-in with an major ebook seller yet. However, they will likely get accurate display for several formats before 2011 and get their act together sometime in 2011.
Without knowing how well the Openbook reader performed several mobileread members purchased the reader sight unseen.That might tell something about the pull an inexpensive reader might have, even on sophisticated users. The reader was offered with a 30 day return privilege -the buyers weren't gamblers.
You should be able
to exceed the Openbook price point
and even get double digit share in NA, Pacific Basin or Europe. To do that your device needs to look "cool" [whatever that is], be eye-friendly[little eye strain], render
most popular formats accurately, display PDF reasonably, provide a convenient way for buyers to purchase books and to borrow ebooks from libraries [public or rental maybe]. This indicates you need to support DRM such as Adobe Digital and/or ePUB's DRM flavor. As a later player, a new vendor [except Apple and Amazon] cannot dictate a new format.
I'm not clear about the need to provide GEN 3 Telecom data access to books in a base-priced reader. You might have a second flavor with a higher price for that. If your users can browse and buy books using their smart phones
but for delivery to their purpose-built ereader, that would be a big plus even if they were not to read on their phones. Folks seem to like using WiFi to put data on their devices such as phones and readers. The need to connect a device to a PC or MAC using a cable seems to turn buyers off. I don't know how much extra might be paid to have this feature.
How much would I really pay?
For my second ereader,this week I paid $300 for a quality B&W [eINK] reader. That reader receives raves from sophisticated buyers.I doubt this vendor will ever have double digit market share most places [maybe in Cyrillic countries]. It is however the kind of reader members of Mobileread.com might [do] buy.
But I don't know about marketing, I'm just an engineer!