New e-Paper for the future.

[haydnfan]

Originally Posted by jswinden

For anyone who has been purchasing eReaders since they first debuted with eInk screens, the $300 current price tag is still less than they sold for a decade ago.

With any new technology the price is high in the early adoption phase. That's based upon supply-demand and earning back the r&d costs. It's a mistake to compare the cost of a first generation Kindle to the Oasis because their cost was set for very different reasons.

When I first bought a dvd player, I spent $200, and I knew people just the year before that paid $300. A few years later only a fool would pay that much for a dvd player. But a few dvd players were priced that high and higher. Those were niche players for videophiles.

The first generation kindle was expensive because it was in the early adoption phase of what would be a mass market product. The Oasis is expensive because it is a product for a niche market. It is meant to do two things (a) sell to a small group of people for whom money is no object, and (b) prop up poor Voyage sells (it makes the Voyage look cheaper in comparison and thus more enticing).

I wish everyone here would please stop with the "Oasis is reasonably priced because the Kindle 1 was expensive" illogical stupid mantra.

Yes, Amazon did sell cheap devices for long enough of a time to virtually capture the market. Look at what happened to so many of the competitors like the B&N Nook and Sony. Where are their eInk eReaders now? They are extinct! Look at what happened to so many of the competitors like the B&N Nook and Sony. Where are their eInk eReaders now? They are extinct!

Nook just launched a new eink reader. They are clearly not extinct. I disagree with looking at the hardware market. Since the majority of readers of ebooks are doing their reading on tablets and phones, it is the ebook market that needs to be looked at. The major competitors are Apple and Kobo.

Also your narrative is just wrong. There was price matching across the board on eink readers. Kobo, Kindle, Nook kept lowering prices and adding features and the other companies would follow suit. It was not the price of the ereader that allowed amazon to monopolize the market. Amazon priced their ebooks lower than everyone else and made the shopping experience frictionless. Just look at Sony, how many steps did it take to buy and get an ebook on the reader? And you needed a computer!

[haydnfan]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Good point, but -

Let's wait and see what Amazon does with the $80 Kindle. If they raise the price with the next model then you were right.

It makes no sense to look at the bargain kindle. Obviously Amazon isn't interested in front lighting technology because it's not in the basic kindle, oh wait... Obviously Amazon isn't interested in resolution because the kindle kindle is only 800x600, oh wait...

The basic Kindle exists to be cheap. The Paperwhite exists to be a mid-priced ereader that pushes new technology forward. The Voyage and Oasis exist to be slightly more refined high end versions of the Paperwhite.

We don't look at the basic kindle. It exists to get price conscious customers into Amazon's ecosystem. Amazon can raise the price of the Paperwhite by a little bit or simply put the new screen in a high end reader. Amazon has already proven itself not averse to higher prices on ereaders. So the question is their enough of a market for Amazon to do it?

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

I would be inclined to say no, they are not trying to drive the prices up.
$300 for a premium ereader with a case is not badly priced at all.
Most items come in various price ranges.
Heck a bottom end kindle is $80. That is without a cover.
Then the more features you add on, the higher the price.
I think the term is "what is the market willing to pay"

You know groceries are the same way.
I can buy corn for 80 cents or I can buy the same amount of corn for $3.
Most of the extra cost is in the packaging and how it is marketing.

So no, not trying to drive the cost up, they are giving people what the people think they want at a price they think people are willing to pay.

Simple marketing.

Yep and the .80 corn and the $3.00 corn probably came through the same factory and started in the same field. Electronics in general are like that too. When I was in college I had a math teacher who had put labels on tubes for radios (back when radios had tubes). He'd have a bunch of tubes before him and put an RCA label on one a Panasonic (or whatever) on another etc. but they were all the same exact tube. Just the label was different from one another.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by crich70

Yep and the .80 corn and the $3.00 corn probably came through the same factory and started in the same field. Electronics in general are like that too. When I was in college I had a math teacher who had put labels on tubes for radios (back when radios had tubes). He'd have a bunch of tubes before him and put an RCA label on one a Panasonic (or whatever) on another etc. but they were all the same exact tube. Just the label was different from one another.

You are absolutely correct. The $3 corn is processed first, then the 80 cent corn.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by haydnfan

With any new technology the price is high in the early adoption phase. That's based upon supply-demand and earning back the r&d costs. It's a mistake to compare the cost of a first generation Kindle to the Oasis because their cost was set for very different reasons.

When I first bought a dvd player, I spent $200, and I knew people just the year before that paid $300. A few years later only a fool would pay that much for a dvd player. But a few dvd players were priced that high and higher. Those were niche players for videophiles.

The first generation kindle was expensive because it was in the early adoption phase of what would be a mass market product. The Oasis is expensive because it is a product for a niche market. It is meant to do two things (a) sell to a small group of people for whom money is no object, and (b) prop up poor Voyage sells (it makes the Voyage look cheaper in comparison and thus more enticing).

I wish everyone here would please stop with the "Oasis is reasonably priced because the Kindle 1 was expensive" illogical stupid mantra.



Nook just launched a new eink reader. They are clearly not extinct. I disagree with looking at the hardware market. Since the majority of readers of ebooks are doing their reading on tablets and phones, it is the ebook market that needs to be looked at. The major competitors are Apple and Kobo.

Also your narrative is just wrong. There was price matching across the board on eink readers. Kobo, Kindle, Nook kept lowering prices and adding features and the other companies would follow suit. It was not the price of the ereader that allowed amazon to monopolize the market. Amazon priced their ebooks lower than everyone else and made the shopping experience frictionless. Just look at Sony, how many steps did it take to buy and get an ebook on the reader? And you needed a computer!

Early TV sets were the same. That's why it was such a big deal to win one on the early quiz or game shows of the 1950's. They were very expensive back then and many couldn't afford to buy one. VCR's were over $1,000.00 in the early days and it took a while for them to drop to where many could afford them too. That's also why many people couldn't read back in the old days. Books were expensive to produce prior to the printing press. Louis XIV was considered rich because he had a large library of 24 volumes. New tech always gets cheaper after a while.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by haydnfan

I wish everyone here would please stop with the "Oasis is reasonably priced because the Kindle 1 was expensive" illogical stupid mantra.

Yes! It's basic economics.

It's like old folks say how things cost only so many cents back in their day, and so they're priced too high nowadays.

This "the device is reasonably priced because I paid sooo much for my first device" is an inversion of that sort of claim, and is economically just as wrong, and is the technophile's equivalent of that old folk's fallacy. It's a form of sunk investment fallacy that afflicts early adopters who remain stuck in nostalgia and ignore basic logic and economics.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

Yes! It's basic economics.

It's like old folks say how things cost only so many cents back in their day, and so they're priced too high nowadays.

This "the device is reasonably priced because I paid sooo much for my first device" is an inversion of that sort of claim, and is economically just as wrong, and is the technophile's equivalent of that old folk's fallacy. It's a form of sunk investment fallacy that afflicts early adopters who remain stuck in nostalgia and ignore basic logic and economics.

No, it's not. New technology doesn't just appear with massive factory lines and a well-tuned manufacturing process. You start small and cheap in production, and bootstrap your way up to larger and more efficient processes based on sales from earlier products. So, when someone tells you that early ereaders cost $350 each, they are saying that you shouldn't expect an ereader based on new technology to be cheap.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

It won't be used in ereaders. There's no money in that market any more:

There is money. Extrapolating from figures in this article, I gather that E Ink Holdings Inc's annual revenue from eReader displays is roughly US$300 million:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/.../18/2003646493

Unfortunately, for E Ink Holdings, it is costing more than that to produce those displays -- which perhaps is your point. Since it looks like demand for the product is continuing, and Amazon can't want them to go out of business, I expect that costs of production, and revenue, will soon balance.

Re the OP (post #1) report, hello! It is based on what amounts to a press release from Xinhua, the official state news agency of an authoritarian government, blowing the horn of a local firm. Googling the named company, the great majority of the hits come back, directly or indirectly, to that press release.

Here is a link to another article that also links back the the press release, but at least tries to provide some perspective:

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-chinese...paper.html#jCp

Thus far, the new material has not been publicly demonstrated, and it is still not clear how available products will be even after they move into production next year as promised. Despite advances, such as those made by engineers at MIT last year, it is still not clear if it will be possible to mass produce such a product in a defect-free manner. Also not clear is if the new material will be sold in partnership with other companies with a high profile in marketing e-readers, such as Amazon's Kindle device.

Based on what we now know, I am going to call Guangzhou OED Technologies's graphene electronic paper an example of vaporware.

P.S. My first link is from a good independent newspaper.

[murg]

Originally Posted by crich70

Louis XIV was considered rich because he had a large library of 24 volumes. New tech always gets cheaper after a while.

Louis XIV was considered rich because he effectively owned all of France.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by rkomar

No, it's not. New technology doesn't just appear with massive factory lines and a well-tuned manufacturing process. You start small and cheap in production, and bootstrap your way up to larger and more efficient processes based on sales from earlier products. So, when someone tells you that early ereaders cost $350 each, they are saying that you shouldn't expect an ereader based on new technology to be cheap.

What new technology?

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

What new technology?

The graphene-based technology that was linked to in the first post.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by rkomar

The graphene-based technology that was linked to in the first post.

The Oasis does not use that technology.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by murg

Louis XIV was considered rich because he effectively owned all of France.

He also had a very large (for the time) library though that a lesser man couldn't have had. Then technology changed so that books could be mass produced and things changed. Now days a young child could have at least that many books in their library if not more.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

The Oasis does not use that technology.

Ha! I came back to this thread after a long absence and assumed it was still on topic. Silly me!

Okay, I agree that saying that ereaders used to cost $300 dollars when the technology was new is no justification for charging the same price when the technology is more mature and mainstream.

[Barty]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Ha! I came back to this thread after a long absence and assumed it was still on topic. Silly me!

Okay, I agree that saying that ereaders used to cost $300 dollars when the technology was new is no justification for charging the same price when the technology is more mature and mainstream.

Well, people keep buying them. If I'm Amazon, I'll charge more for the next one.

Keep increasing the price til there is no taker, then take it down a notch