Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
Ultimately, the answer to this question lies not so much in how many people out there like to read e-books, but with how many of those people are die-hard e-ink fanatics. I'm guessing there probably aren't enough of those folks to make e-ink based ereaders viable. Look at the news stories swirling around Saturday's sale date. 300,000+ iPads in one day? How could Sony and Amazon possibly keep up with that pace? Of course, Apple isn't going to keep selling them at anywhere near that rate, but it's a near certainty that they will sell a few million of these things over the course of a year. They'll likely sell more iPads in a week than Amazon has sold of the Kindle in its entire lifetime. Those kind of swamping numbers mean that within a year or even less, Apple will completely dominate the ereader market. There may be enough people around who absolutely must have e-ink above all else to allow one or two large companies such as Sony and Amazon to keep selling a miniscule few units. The smaller players in the market, especially the higher-priced end (Que, Skiff, iRex) are going to have a pretty hard time. Skiff is backed by some big-time money (Hearst), so they may still attempt a go of it. My prediction is that Que is gone before it ever left the gate.
The problem any of these companies are going to have is that you put an iPad next to any e-ink based ereader, and the iPad has the ereader beat six ways from Sunday in almost all consumers' minds except for the die-hard e-ink fanatic. The iPad is a few hundred dollars more expensive, of course, but hell, it's an entire laptop replacement for a lot of people who are only interested in a computer for email and Facebook. If the iPad were $1500, the story would be different, but at the price points the iPad is selling at, the extra money isn't going to make any difference to most people.
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You can't compare that way. E-ink devices are just for reading, their market are ebook/doc readers.
iPad allows, besides reading, games, music, videos/movies, web-surfing, emailing, social networking, etc.
That means if Apple sold 300000 units of iPad in its first day, that doesn't mean 300000 people opted for this device instead of an e-ink ereader. Probably 299000 were people interested in videogaming, websurfing, etc. Anything but reading. So it's unfair to compare directly the sales figures to answer this topic's question.