Why are large e-ink ereaders so costly?

[Billi]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

And those people seem to be better served with Tablets.
They trade off battery life for color displays and application abundance.

With "market for larger readers" I was not restricting myself to large eink readers but I was thinking of large mobile reading devices in general. If one will choose an eink reader, tablet or laptop depends on one's preferences and financial possibilities, but the huge market itself exists. And I personally see a not so little market share for eye-friendly, battery-frugal devices inside this large market, but I may err in this.

[Dulin's Books]

Originally Posted by fafaforza

And the primary reason for a large size are technical docs or full size PDFs, and honestly, eInk is too slow to quickly flip through documents, go from page to page, open a diagram that's a few pages away from the text you're currently reading, zoom in, etc.

too slow for you. the Pocketbook Pro devices and others do so at what I consider reasonable speed

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Billi

And I personally see a not so little market share for eye-friendly, battery-frugal devices inside this large market, but I may err in this.

It depends on what we each mean by "large" and "small".

My baseline for "large" is the current eink reader market where 6" readers from the major vendors run at 1 million units a year, minimum, and the top brands run in the 10 million a year range.

Conversely, "small" to me is an order of magnitude lower, with 100,000 units a year or thereabouts. Which is probably larger than current 10" reader volumes.

Now, a couple years back, sales of 20,000 a year were something to brag about and 100,000 a year was big. But the market has grown a lot since then. And it is going to keep growing once the european markets get real.

[geenp]

I'm not sure how it is with e-ink screens but screen price rises disproportionately to screen size with most screen technologies. I believe that and economies of scale to be the reason

[Beryll Snyder]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

It depends on what we each mean by "large" and "small".

My baseline for "large" is the current eink reader market where 6" readers from the major vendors run at 1 million units a year, minimum, and the top brands run in the 10 million a year range.

Conversely, "small" to me is an order of magnitude lower, with 100,000 units a year or thereabouts. Which is probably larger than current 10" reader volumes.

Now, a couple years back, sales of 20,000 a year were something to brag about and 100,000 a year was big. But the market has grown a lot since then. And it is going to keep growing once the european markets get real.

If you take into account all the university/highscool student and scientists: how much of a market is this? Many Millions, I guess ...

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Beryll Snyder

If you take into account all the university/highscool student and scientists: how much of a market is this? Many Millions, I guess ...

University and High School are different markets.
So are scientists.
The biggest of those is K-12, with 55 million student in the US alone.
For an idea of the opportunity and above all, challenges, of going after that market, check this out: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/tex...allenges/19733

As I said, the tech isn't there for the K-12 market at all. Those things need to be dirt cheap and mil-spec rugged to sell in volume.
For university and academic use (not just scientific) the tech isn't there either, but the problem is those customers need and want PC-grade functionality from a cellphone-derived device. And find even current large-format eink expensive (as per the O.P.).

The quickest path to a proper educational/academic reader device runs through the Win8 on Intel tabletPCs due Real-Soon-Now. Those will run the needed software but battery life and, above all, cost, will limit their use. The next best path is to wait on the tablet market to evolve a couple generations in hardware *and* software. And a couple more to lower the price. Might be 3-5 years, might be 10, depending on mobile display tech developments. (With Mirasol starting to acquire a fresh lemony scent, 10 might not be out of the question.)

As the ZDNet article points out, even Apple isn't going to make much of a dent any time soon.

As is, Microsoft partners have been selling TabletPCs with most of the functionality needed for academic use and few have been buying; the things sell by the million but mostly to the corporate market because of the price: ~US$1000. I have 2. Great tools. But cheap they're not.

It is not enough to have a mass of people that want something; they also have to be willing to pay enough for the product to justify the effort. The *theoretical* market for these devices is inmense but the actual market for the devices the tech can deliver *today* is tiny compared to its potential.

Today the tech can deliver an oversized eink fiction reader with simple/simplistic annotation features (no round-tripping or embedding of annotations, for starters) or a mediapad Tablet waiting for a full suite of suitable apps, both at prices beyonf what the potential market wants.

Even the Ectaco color reader is lightyears from what the market needs. And they at least have a glimmer of what is needed.

Either the potential market adjusts expectations and compromises or it waits.
I'd suggest: wait.
But it's going to be a long one. Maybe not even this decade.

[Beryll Snyder]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

University and High School are different markets.
So are scientists.
The biggest of those is K-12, with 55 million student in the US alone.
For an idea of the opportunity and above all, challenges, of going after that market, check this out: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/tex...allenges/19733

As I said, the tech isn't there for the K-12 market at all. Those things need to be dirt cheap and mil-spec rugged to sell in volume.
For university and academic use (not just scientific) the tech isn't there either, but the problem is those customers need and want PC-grade functionality from a cellphone-derived device. And find even current large-format eink expensive (as per the O.P.).

The quickest path to a proper educational/academic reader device runs through the Win8 on Intel tabletPCs due Real-Soon-Now. Those will run the needed software but battery life and, above all, cost, will limit their use. The next best path is to wait on the tablet market to evolve a couple generations in hardware *and* software. And a couple more to lower the price. Might be 3-5 years, might be 10, depending on mobile display tech developments. (With Mirasol starting to acquire a fresh lemony scent, 10 might not be out of the question.)

As the ZDNet article points out, even Apple isn't going to make much of a dent any time soon.

As is, Microsoft partners have been selling TabletPCs with most of the functionality needed for academic use and few have been buying; the things sell by the million but mostly to the corporate market because of the price: ~US$1000. I have 2. Great tools. But cheap they're not.

It is not enough to have a mass of people that want something; they also have to be willing to pay enough for the product to justify the effort. The *theoretical* market for these devices is inmense but the actual market for the devices the tech can deliver *today* is tiny compared to its potential.

Today the tech can deliver an oversized eink fiction reader with simple/simplistic annotation features (no round-tripping or embedding of annotations, for starters) or a mediapad Tablet waiting for a full suite of suitable apps, both at prices beyonf what the potential market wants.

Even the Ectaco color reader is lightyears from what the market needs. And they at least have a glimmer of what is needed.

Either the potential market adjusts expectations and compromises or it waits.
I'd suggest: wait.
But it's going to be a long one. Maybe not even this decade.

Great post. I agree with you totally that we are at a beginning here.
And I myself have advise people to wait and not to rush into buying half-developped devices.
But: I think things will develop rapidly, if other IT-sectors are any indicator at all.
As you point out, costs are a major limiting factor - the hope is that reduction of prices for textbooks(because becoming obsolete) will finance the hardware - and that is my hope too.
Only the future will tell ...

[fafaforza]

Originally Posted by Dulin's Books

too slow for you. the Pocketbook Pro devices and others do so at what I consider reasonable speed

The word "reasonable" is already sounding apologetic.

I'm a huge fan of my PRS, had a PRS-505 since like 2008, got a 650. But I'll tell you what, I wouldn't want an eInk device when I'm working on my car and trying to quickly find a spot in a service manual, to zoom in to a specific part, to pan around, then zoom out and change pages again, because eInk readers just dont do that well with PDFs. Maybe it's a software fault, whatever, the fact is that for tech. docs like that, a PDF reader on a laptop/netbook/tablet is a better option.

[Dulin's Books]

meanwhile i actually have the workshop manual and wiring diagram for my rx-8 on several of my eink readers along with directions for several modifications all in PDF and I have done those modification while using those eink readers.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by fafaforza

The word "reasonable" is already sounding apologetic.

I'm a huge fan of my PRS, had a PRS-505 since like 2008, got a 650. But I'll tell you what, I wouldn't want an eInk device when I'm working on my car and trying to quickly find a spot in a service manual, to zoom in to a specific part, to pan around, then zoom out and change pages again, because eInk readers just dont do that well with PDFs. Maybe it's a software fault, whatever, the fact is that for tech. docs like that, a PDF reader on a laptop/netbook/tablet is a better option.

Aren't those 6" ereaders? I can read .PDFs on my 5" jetBook Lite, but that would be my
last choice. My ASUS Transformer can do all that you are asking for, and more, but it
uses an LCD display so is not that great in the sun.

I don't place the blame on the display type, though. The size of the display, matters, for
PDFs. That is as far as reading them is concerned. I would think that most of the other
features you want could be covered by features used in the teacher students setting.

In other words, the current Color jetBook might be an "eInk reader" that does work
well with PDFs.

Luck;
Ken