Quote:
Originally Posted by OakIris
At some point in the (near) future, I imagine black & white-only eReaders will also be considered "dinosaurs."
Holly
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Probably.
And yet...
...desktop laser printers have been around for over 25 years and even though color laser and color inkjets are readily afordable, good old b&w lasers still command a respectable share of the market because of economics.
It may yet come to pass that eink economics might result in enough of a cost advantage for plain old b&w to endure well into the color reader era. I'm thinking that the underlying hardware for color eink readers is going to essentially mirror the underlying hardware for *good* android webpads, just substituting eink for the LCD panel; 1GHz CPU, a graphics accelerator, lots of RAM and lots of storage.
In contrast, b&w readers do fine with 200-400MHz older-gen cpus, as little as 64MB RAM, and 2-4GB storage. More, we'll likely see single-chip readers in the very near future that will bring the price of an entry-level unconnected reader into double-digit pricing. I suspect reader development is eventually likely going to work in at least two direction; high-capability color readers that will try to eat into the current LCD slate-computer business at the high-end and very small, very low price b&w readers for consumers of fiction and other forms of recreational reading. Pricing for the latter could conceivably mirror low-end calculator prices. Not soon, mind you, but sub-$50 b&w reader list prices are far from impossible. That might keep'em around longer than we might otherwise expect.
To me, the key difference is that PC vendors have never had much incentive to maintain device capability constant and ride the price curve down Moore's law; they would much rather keep prices stable and ride the features up the Moore's law curve.
Meanwhile, eBook readers that are tied in to ebookstores (Nook, Kindle, Kobo) have *every* incentive to price the gadget as low as possible to grow their "storefront access" share. We're already seeing this playing out as all three "storefront readers" are happily playing in the sub-$150 range and driving competitors up-market into high-feature devices. We'll know fairly soon if the strategy results in enough volume to justify even further cuts in which case we could in fact see a race to the bottom that will make early color eink readers a tougher sell. To me the issue isn't when we'll see the *first* color eink reader (Fujitsu already did it) but when we'll see the first ones that are a compelling non-niche buy. And I don't see those anywhere near the horizon. Not in market with LCD tablets.
It's not all about the tech; economies of scale and business model matters too. Going to be interesting no matter what.