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Dedicated e-readers will exist as long as people vote with their money and create enough profit for the device makers. That's just business.
Not everyone will want a dedicated device, but niche markets still get served, especially if the tech is cheap to produce relative to sale price. With dedicated e-readers, there's also the advantage of subsidizing the hardware costs through the selling of content. Stats indicate that heavy readers often prefer dedicated hardware and buy more books. To me, those types of stats indicate that dedicated e-readers will continue to exist, even with tech advances in multiple-use devices such as iPad.
About 15 years ago, I got hooked on Tetris. It was the only game I played, and I bought a hand-held Game Boy (not cheap) to play it. Nowadays, they sell a dedicated device to play Tetris and nothing but; it sells for about 20 bucks. Tech has long advanced, but that's just one instance of demand still driving production.
Last edited by Maggie Leung; 06-26-2010 at 02:52 PM.
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