Will converged devices take over from the Sony Reader and the Kindle?
By Paul Biba
It’s a very serious question and here is Trevor Dolby’s opinion in BookBrunch.
It is the convergent devices that will take over the market. The unannounced but pretty much certain iTablet and its equivalents will be the devices that we all read books on. OK, you say, so what about e-Ink – isn’t that supposed to be the major distinguishing feature? Well you are not going to tell me that Steve Jobs hasn’t made a call to a small team of boffins in Cupertino and said, Right fellas, I want a program that mimics e-Ink: stable and energy-efficient and looks like “the real thing”.
In five years the Kindle and Sony e-book will no longer exist. On our wafer-thin computers, like large iPods, we will be reading a book while listening to music. The phone will ring or mail will ping, the machine will ask if you want to answer, you will chat, then the machine will ask if you want to continue reading. As for battery life, these devices will recharge continually via wi-fi.
Convergence has happened in a number of areas before ereaders came to market. There used to be such a thing as a PDA and that is now almost gone because it has converged into the cellphone. The cellphone is converging with mp3 players and cameras. Stand alone GPS units (or PNDs) are also converging into cellphones. We already have ereading software for cellphones. Maybe Trevor is right.
September 4th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Bit late ‘innit? I’ve been converging like mad for a decade.
My cellphone plays my music, takes my pictures, reads my ebooks, announces my schedule, browses the web, and keeps track of my tasks. Uh … there was something … oh yeah, and makes phone calls. I charge it every few days. Net cost to me thanks to Verizon, $0.
Admittedly, if I’m reading a long book, I tend to use my old PDA with its slightly larger screen. I’ve never found any motivation to buy a separate ebook reader with whatever gee-whiz technology screen. It just doesn’t pay.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
September 4th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
“As for battery life, these devices will recharge continually via wi-fi.”
That’d be a neat trick.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Some thoughts here…
1. I am never sure how credible anyone is who believe that a computer program (software) will enable a conventional display to emulate the properties of e-Ink. In addition, I am also not sure that charging our devices via “wi-fi” will be such a good idea either (also if we can charge them, why bother charging and just run them straight off the “wi-fi” power.
2. There are limits to how much convergence makes sense. Yes, you can watch movies, play games, take pictures and read books on your smart phone. However, the more serious you are about one of those activities, the less likely you are to use your smart phone to do that activity on a regular basis. Why? Anyone remember the old phrase, “Jack of all trades, master of none”? Its simple really, smart phones are phones and PDAS first, as a result, they must compromises as game machines, cameras, video players and book readers. While they get better at those activities every year, its doubtful that they can ever reach the cutting edge in those activities. Just consider this, does anyone ever expect to hear a photo enthusiast say, “I have decided to sell my DSLR… I have my smart phone and that is good enough.”
3. Ultimately, I suspect that in a few years, there will be a display that will combine the easy viewing of eInk with the speed and color fidelity of advanced computer displays. When that day comes, then I expect converged devices can serve their purpose as book readers. The question is, will they? Ever notice that UMPCs never really took off? And that Netbooks have a tendancy to have their screens grow? The screen size used on many ebook readers might be ideal for reading a book, but frankly, they suck for anything else. They are too small to adequately replace a dedicated computer or video screen, but are too large to be convenient go where you want devices. I expect that Apple or someone else might bring out a 6-8″ tablet computer with a great display, and easy to use touch screen in the next year or two. It might even take off… but I also expect that it will quickly either grow to be a 10″+ device or it will shrink into a PDA like device (More likely the latter if it is not an apple). If that is indeed the case, the dedicated ebook reader might continue to soldier on.
I could be wrong… but thats the great thing about the future, no one knows what is coming
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Bill
September 4th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Tablets will emerge within 3-4 years that are colour and eInk-like, 11 inch screens with proper OS’s and web-browsing capabilities. And these will cast today’s generation of eReaders into the junkheap of history. But what will make them truly compelling is that they’ll become eWriters (with ePens) as well as eReaders. They’ll finally fill the “analogue gap” that we see in offices and lecture-halls around the world; competent users of digital technology who almost all resort to paper and pen to take & keep notes, scribble useful diagrams and ideas, etc – only for these collected tomes of thoughts to gather dust and be lost within a year or two. At the moment we are given no choice because the technologies on offer are so poor – to put it bluntly, how many socially competent individuals have you seen in a meeting making notes on a laptop or smartphone?! The new eWriters wil give us the option to save notes as analog format, or to OCR-convert. But they’ll all be saved and tagged for easy reference and usage. We’ll finally have a device which begins to recognise that HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IS ANALOGUE!!!
So give it five to six years, and we’ll see laptops pushed aside for all but the most high-end of uses/users. Instead, we’ll all leave home with an eWriter tablet which will be the primary repository and interface for all our thinking & learning: – books, newspapers, magazines, textbooks, journals, documents, videos. Plus notes, annotations, doodles, mind-maps, etc etc.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Convergence sounds like divergence for book reading; the more functions the less dedication to any one. Paper is fully dedicated to book reading. The RM of the paper book is absolute, the overt content immutable and there is no distractive connectivity other than your own reflection. Sounds like e-books are disregarding another technology and market path when they commit to screen delivery only.
September 4th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I’ve been arguing for convergence for years as well. Gary, a converged device does not have to get in the way of reading… in fact, the properly converged device will augment reading, say, through apps that will allow storage, cross-referencing, annotation and what I like to call “scrap-booking,” the ability to clip and paste parts of books, articles, graphics and news into subject-ordered folders.
I see this “digital scrapbook” to be the future form of the personal library, allowing the user to store entire documents and lit, parts of documents and lit, and small favorite elements to peruse and reference at any time.
As far as e-ink is concerned, I don’t deny that it is a good display (at least for B&W, so far). But I think a properly-designed converged device won’t have to run e-ink to be popular… the usefulness of such a device would outweigh the advantages of an e-ink screen for many people.
September 4th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Stanza on my iPod weighs nothing, costs nothing, and takes up no space. So far, so good.
But the battery life is much less. That could still be the deciding factor. I wouldn’t want to read books on my phone and drain the battery so that I can’t make calls.
I still hope for the iPod Ink.
September 4th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
The advantage of e-ink is the ability to read it in bright sunlight and its low power consumption. Paper also has these advantages, but the computer that has the e-ink screen also has the ability to store vast amounts of data and also be transportable electronically. I think it is brilliant of the movie industry to disburse a 150 page script to an actor, director and/or producer via whispernet, instead of a large tome on letter size paper via special courier. I agree that a tablet computer will replace the Kindle, but by then it just might have displayed across the top of the screen… “Amazon Kindle”.
September 5th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Convergence is already happen, but I think there will always be a place for specific form factors, even if the more specialized ones are limited to a “luxury” market. I have an iPhone and I like reading on it on breaks and while waiting for a meeting to start, but I wouldn’t want to read a whole book it it.
Conversely, I wouldn’t want to carry around a device as big as a Kindle to use as a phone. Even with a small bluetooth device in my ear, that’s still a pretty wide pocket. My pants would look funny.
I am surprised, however, that I like reading on my iPhone even a little bit, considering the backlight, and this makes me think that a Apple tablet would pretty much replace the kindle and the sony e-reader, if only because a tablet enhances the reading experience instead of just replicating it.
September 6th, 2009 at 9:42 am
@martin:
They solved that problem. It’s called “the replaceable battery”. Demand the best. Some fruit flavored manufacturers have not yet figured it out, but I’m told it’s coming.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
September 6th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
A couple of more thoughts…
1. An 11″ tablet is too large for many uses. Sure it works great at home, but it is too large for many purposes.
2. I will be very surprised if e-pens will ever take over for keyboard entry on computers. Most people don’t use laptops to take notes because laptops are big and relatively bulky… but I have yet to see a pen interface on a computer that I was able to write legibly and consistently on. In any case, I rarely write by hand these days. I can type 80-90 words to minute, heck I can text as fast, if not faster than I can write by hand.
Basically the problem here is as follows… Converged devices only make sense when they are more convenient for us all. A smart phone makes sense because it is about the same size as an existing PDA. If the smart phone was much bigger, it would be too big… much smaller and it would loose utility. Likewise, for ebooks to converge with something else, we would have to find a device to is just as effective on a 5-7″ screen.
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Bill
September 8th, 2009 at 10:45 am
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the key to convergence is it lets you sell devices to a much larger market, well beyond the smaller market of hardcore book readers. This lets you take advantage of scale in manufacturing and create devices with lower prices. This again increases the size of your market.
I do think that standalone e-readers will continue to exist, but they’re going to be an expensive niche product.
September 8th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
David,
By that standard, I think the converged device already exists in the sense that PDAs and SmartPhones have been capable of reading ebooks for years.
This though makes me wonder if converged devices will be to ebooks what converged devices are to video games. Sure lots of people might buy tetris or some other game for their smartphone, but I would be willing to bet that the market for PSP and Gameboy games is still quite a bit larger despite catering to a smaller group of more dedicated gamers.
As for the absolute expense? Consider me a skeptic. Already there are readers available for under $200, including the PRS300 which is brand new. My guess is, that within a year, some readers will be available for $99.
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Bill
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Bill
September 9th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Old news.
Ultimately, I think that we’re going to wind up with two classes of hand-held devices. There’s going to be one class with small screens for audio-only purposes (like music and telephony) and a larger screen for visual purposes (books, video, web browsing). They might be linked, but they’ll be two different devices. The ideal “form factor” for a phone is different from that for a video player. A phone you can stick in your pocket and just have an earphone in; video needs a screen larger than easily fits in the pocket.