Last September, I wrote a piece about a new e-book reader under development at Plastic Logic (see "E-books: The flexible future").
At the time, the company was hoping to ship its still unnamed e-book reader in the first half of this year. I was really looking forward to it, since it provides a unique combination of two valuable features: a big screen and enough flexibility to tolerate a little bit of bending. (I worry about my Kindle getting crunched in my briefcase.)
Monday night, I was watching the local news from KGO-TV in San Francisco, and caught a story on Plastic Logic. The reporter mentioned that the reader was due out "next year"-- so I sent an email to Plastic Logic's media-relations contact to check on that.
It turns out the report was correct. There are three reasons for the delay:
1) It's taking longer than expected to prepare Plastic Logic's factory in Germany to produce the devices, and the company wants to have plenty of inventory so that early buyers won't be disappointed, as many Kindle customers were in 2007.
2) The product itself is evolving with "more features and functionality."
3) Plastic Logic decided not to press for a product launch in the middle of the current recession.
I imagine the decision to wait a year was difficult for Plastic Logic, but it makes sense to me. The e-book market is still developing, and it barely exists at all for business users, the company's intended market.
Being the first to market with a large-format professional e-book reader hasn't given Irex Technologies any obvious advantage. The Irex 1000 series models (described in depth here on CNET) are fine products, but most people I talk to haven't even heard of them.
Similarly, Sony's Reader beat Amazon's Kindle to market by over a year, but today the Kindle is pretty much synonymous with the consumer e-book market.
So in summary, I don't think 2010 is too late. Plastic Logic will get its chance to succeed. All it has to do now is deliver a great product.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal this week, Amazon.com's e-book reader, the Kindle, is out of stock.
The Journal credits Oprah Winfrey, who recommended the Kindle on her show in October.
I saw this effect myself in the page views for old blog posts here--the daily view count for some of my old Kindle posts, especially my comparison of the Kindle with Sony's Reader, spiked the very next day, and it remains higher today than it was before that show aired.
Amazon's Web site reports delivery delays of 11 weeks to 13 weeks, which means that it might even come as late as Washington's Birthday (to be celebrated February 16).
Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.
(Credit: Amazon.com)The larger message in the Journal article is that the Kindle's success proves that "e-book readers are for real," which is a conclusion about which I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I think that many of us knew that already. On the other, sales of Kindle-compatible e-books are still trivial, compared with sales of paper books, so what has really been proved?
I think that all we can really say today about e-books is that they're good for some people. We don't really know how much demand there is for e-books, as they exist today, because market awareness still isn't very high outside the usual "early adopter" community.
But I know one thing for sure: there's a lot of room for improvement. The Kindle's apparent successor has been spotted online, Sony's third-generation Reader was recently released, and I wrote about a good-looking prototype e-book reader from Plastic Logic in September.
All three of these are improvements over the current Kindle in various ways, but they all fall short of the economy, robustness, and readability of paper books.
It seems to me that at this rate, it could be 20 years before e-books begin to outsell paper books.
However popular the Kindle is, it can never address the whole market, as long as it's so closely associated with one bookseller. Without a single dominant platform, we'll never get a single commercial standard for e-book distribution. At the Baen Free Library, Project Gutenberg, and independent e-book sellers such as eBooks.com, customers face an excessive variety of format choices.
For this reason, I'm almost sorry that Amazon sells the Kindle under its own name. I understand why the online retailer chose to develop the Kindle--anything the company can do to promote book sales is good, in the long run--but it might have been better if the Kindle design had been licensed to multiple competing suppliers.
Frankly, I think that even Sony might dump its proprietary platform, if Amazon were more open with the Kindle. My guess is that Sony's Reader business has yet to break even, and given the competition from the Kindle's superior features and celebrity endorsements, it could be a long time before it does.
The Kindle has the potential to become the standard e-book platform, with commercial e-books from Amazon's Kindle store, Amazon's own Web site for free Mobipocket books, and support for direct online downloads from independent Web sites (see Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.com, for example).
It would also be good to see more competition among suppliers of e-book display technology. E Ink owns the whole market, and the company's progress to date has been fairly slow. Sony's third-generation PRS-700 uses an E Ink display virtually identical to that found in the original PRS-500, which came out more than two years ago.
The sooner we reach the point of sub-$100 readers, the sooner we can build a multimillion-customer market for e-books, and the sooner we can start talking seriously about how "e-book readers are for real."
Amazon.com really knows how to treat its customers.
Although I've read a few dozen books on my Kindle by now, my use of it is erratic. I use it heavily for days or weeks at a time, then set it aside for a while to address the stack of paper books by my nightstand. (When Montalvo Systems shut down, I had two 2.5-foot stacks of unread books. After a long summer of unemployment, the unread stack is down to a mere five titles.)
Amazon's Kindle e-book reader
(Credit: Amazon.com)Last Tuesday, I found an e-book I wanted to read, so I got out the Kindle and saw it was dead. (The battery lasts only a few days even if I'm not using it, which really isn't good enough.) I charged it overnight and moved the book onto the Kindle on Wednesday. Later that day when I wanted to read the book, I found the Kindle was out of juice already.
I charged it overnight again (with the radio off in case it was having some kind of issue), forgot about it Thursday and remembered it this morning. But it was dead again. I started it charging again before going out to a lunch interview. When I returned, I turned the unit on and just sort of kept an eye on it, pressing buttons occasionally to keep it mostly awake while doing some other work on my computer.
The battery ran down in less than two hours.
... Read more
Interesting news from the DemoFall conference held this week in San Diego:
Plastic Logic--a company founded to commercialize electronics built on flexible plastic substrates--demonstrated a prototype e-book reader (not yet named) and announced that it plans to ship this product in the first half of next year. You can read the press release for yourself.
This particular gizmo is very attractive. It uses a large, flexible electronic paper display based on technology from E Ink (the same company that makes the displays for Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony's Reader), but the device overall is remarkably thin and light.
And the whole thing is somewhat flexible, so it won't break if it gets slightly bent in a backpack or briefcase. Flexible doesn't mean invulnerable, but it's a lot better than the brittle glass displays of existing e-book readers.
Check out this video from DEMOfall, in which Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demonstrates the prototype. I see some minor problems in the prototype's display--some dead lines and odd drawing glitches--but nothing that should interfere with the scheduled launch.
More importantly, even as a prototype, the display's contrast ratio seems to be better than that of the Kindle or Reader, mostly by virtue of the white being whiter--I'd have to make a direct comparison to be sure, though. I also see all of the critical features I want in an e-book reader: good display resolution... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
