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Why Kindle 2's Screen Took 12 Years and $150 Million
waderoush writes "Critics are eating up everything about Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reader except its $359 price tag. But if you think that's expensive, take a look behind the Kindle at E Ink, the Cambridge, MA, company that has spent $150 million since 1997 developing the electronic paper display that is the Kindle's coolest feature. In the company's first interview since the Kindle 2 came out, E Ink CEO Russ Wilcox says it took far longer than expected to make the microcapsule-based e-paper film not only legible, but durable and manufacturable. Now that the Kindle 2 is finally getting readers to take e-books seriously, however, Wilcox says he sees a profitable future in which many book, magazine, and newspaper publishers will turn to e-paper, if only to save money on printing and delivery. (Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle). 'What we've got here is a technology that could be saving the world $80 billion a year,' Wilcox says."
should make the case, so you can read them in the john and not spread germs
Nullius in verba
"(Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle)" You had me at Kindle.
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
Shutting down factories, great idea!
eInk will never replace newspaper!
How will we start beach bonfires? What will we line the bottom of the bird cage with? What will we do when we forget our umbrellas? What will we put under kitty's food bowl? What will we roll up and smack our friends with? How will we "copy" things with Silly Putty?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
the summary doesn't seem to indicate that while saving tons on printing press per year, you'll be costing businesses down the line money, lost jobs (think ink, delivery, machinery engineers), etc.... So while it may save one type of business, it may put others on the street.
"(Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle)."
Third world labourers wage bills significantly lower than those in developed countries: your company will save money by closing down local presses and giving people output from developing countries.
More news on this channel shortly, don't look away!
Here are some objections Ive heard raised about the Kindle, and my opinions:
* Its not open; that is, you cant program it. The Kindle is not a computer. Its an appliance. I cant reprogram my digital watch either. This just does not bother me.
* eInk cant be backlit, so its hard to read in dim light or the dark. Thats true, although its also true of ordinary books. It would be nice if they could improve this somehow.
* Its hard to share a copy of a book, other than by sharing the reader. Actually you can move a book to the SD card, and move that to another Kindle. Its not hard.
* Pictures do not render well. Thats true. Whats more, at least one book we read was supposed to have a map that would have helped the reader understand the book, and the map was entirely missing.
* You might lose your Kindle, and its not cheap to replace, although you do get all your data (books, your own annotations) back from Amazon. Thats true, just as it is of my notebook computer. This complaint really has to do with the whole concept of ebooks versus print books, not the Kindle specifically.
I am not a real Kindle expert; I dont read the blogs or anything. Theres a great deal more information available at Amazon and many web sites. One good one is Top 25 Kindle Tips.
I have not tried the Sony reader or any other book reader. There are rumors about a second-generation Kindle coming out, but I dont know anything about it.
Summary: It sucks ass. Big time.
Silicon Valley Insider notes that the so called savings would kill ad revenue. Lets not forget where most publications make most of their revenue. The real trick here is to make a profitable ad delivery system on portable devices in order to make subsidized delivery of the devices a real possibility.
Their costs may drop but are we going to see a reduction in price? If the Music industry is any indication we'll pay more for the 'ability' to use the Kindle.
Vinyl records were large, required manufacturing and shipping. MP3s only require bandwidth and a server. (Which isn't free, but much cheaper, and scales up much better). With the whole TTS issue I'm guessing that the Printing industry is going to copy the Music industry (and Video industry)...
For anyone interested, Jeff Bezos is scheduled to appear tonight on Charlie Rose on your local PBS station.
No doubt, he'll spend most of his time talking about Kindle.
The "free" online version of the NY Times contains a minimum of three animated advertisments per article and sometimes more. It takes a few seconds to download an article. Its OK when I read 20 or 30 articles on the average day. But its more like 100-150 on Sunday. I can read the newsprint version in half the time then and frequently buy it then.
Kindle currently uses a paid-subscription model instead of ads. And quite a pricey one for the Times at $14 a month. I'd go broke if I got everything I read through Kindle (they only have 30 newspapers and magazine now).
why it costs so much. Amazon and E Ink need to recoup their R&D costs. At $150 million for those costs, it might be a while before anyone considers lowering the price.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
> What we've got here is a technology that could be saving the world $80 billion a year,' Wilcox says."
Really?
What happened to the 80 billion worth of printers, loggers, paper mills, transport, and fish-wrappers? Did they all go on Welfare so we can ship their jobs overseas to the Kindle manufacturing countries?
News print is a renewable resource. Is the Plastic in Kindle?
You can look around the ads (or read them as you see fit) in newsprint.
Will you be able to do that on the Kindle when corporate sponsors for media grab control of the device and make you stare at an advertisement for 6 seconds prior to viewing the content of a story?
Kindle might be great for books, but remember, its principal reason for being is to enforce DRM, to keep the book you bought on ONE device, to prevent sharing, or even transfer.
Netbooks is where mass media is going. And once you have a netbook, who needs a Kindle.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They've already tried to put DRM on these things, what makes you think they'll stop? This is just another attempt at turning book ownership into the same thing music ownership has become :(
I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer. I've never had problems reading text on computer screens for long stretches but many people say it causes eye strain for them.
I'm curious as to how this technology scales. It boggles the mind to think it took that much time and money to develop but now that they have it, how cheap can they make it? Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost? And what about the books? I have no problem paying a buck or two for a rental like getting a movie out of a DVD kiosk -- I only have the dvd for a limited time, would have to pay again if I wanted it later, and have nothing to physically show for it. I feel more possessive when talking about books, especially books with DRM. DRM, unless you hack it, means your purchase is as impermanent as a rental and renting a book for $9.99 is a pretty damn expensive proposition.
This also brings us back to the issue of resale. There are so many books available on Amazon for what essentially boils down to shipping and handling. I can find even recent books for 75% off the cover price. If physical books are no longer printed or printed in far smaller runs, this means that the secondary market collapses. I can't borrow a book from a friend after they read it. I can't sell the book to a bookstore when I'm done. If my friend wants a copy, he's paying $9.99 the same as I did.
I don't know how this is all going to shake down but it'll certainly be an interesting fight.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
So when one of your Subscribers drops their Kindle, replacing it and 4 hours of tech support is still cheaper than paper?
Ya ok, look into the rest of the tech industry and see what quality tech support is costing us right now please.
There is a fear in the publishing industry that authors could cut them out and sell directly to the readers. E-books should not be price above the cost of a paperback. I would pay $5.00 for a fiction e-book and 1 or 2 dollars for a short story.
Profit is almost $5.00 per reader for the author as opposed to $0.80 on a $7.99 paperback.
Textbooks and technical books could still charge about $10 or $20 a book
1.) Write a book
2.) Convert it to PDF
3.) ???
4.) Profit
I read news at NYTimes.com - in color - from a laptop for free, and with Adblockplus I don't have to wade through full-page ads for The Hottest Movie of the Year. So how is e-Ink supposed to save the NY Times money again?
The winner of the "ebook" competition is going to have to emulate Apples iTune "dollar-store" pricing. Thats when people decide the convenience trumps free. I get most of my reading material free online or libraries now. I can see where Kindle is more convenient, but not willing to pay the high content prices yet.
Now that the Kindle 2 is finally getting readers to take e-books seriously
*snort* I'm sorry, who's taking the kindle 2 and ebooks seriously? *snicker*
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Sorry, but as cool as I think the concept of e-Ink really is, I can't get past the fact that native Kindle books are tied to your Amazon account. The Kindle represents an attack on the first sale doctrine, and I refuse to support it to the tune of $400 plus the price of crippled books.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Jeff Bezos also appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart a couple days ago. Jon gave him a hard time about how you have to pay $359 just for the device and another $10 per book (some of which are DRM'ed). Mr. Bezos didn't have a good response.
What I think he should have pointed out is that The Daily Show interviews many authors and it would really be nice to hear about a new book, download it, and start reading it in minutes rather than wait a few days for it to arrive in the mail.
Wake me up when it costs the same as a newspaper or print book. Look at how people read newspapers. They have coffee, read the paper, and then drop it for the next guy.
We already have something far better than a Kindle.
It is called a Netbook with a web browser.
Not only that, my browser is totally open and I do not have to buy a $354 unit again when I want to read my books, or print them out. My books do not magically evaporate because I did not pay a license fee to read them on some crappy black and white device.
Kindle. It bites.
Kindle 2! It bites more!
Stupid idea.
Dumb.
Oh, and the web has ALREADY saved far more trees than you can possibly imagine. Way before the Kindle got here, newspapers were starting to go out of business, computer manufacturers were delivering documentation on CD in PDF form.
Way too much hype around this stupid device.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"(Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle)." Except the Kindle 2 doesn't do color. Also, they assume there would be no costs for distributing newspaper electronically. I'm not saying it wouldn't be cheaper, but their analysis is way off.
They've been making these kind of claims for a decade now, and have been burning through investment money like they were back in the dot-com days.
The technology is still supremely inferior to, and far more expensive than LCD panels.
After a hype piece like this, expect them to go back to the till.
As someone who has been using Plucker on my Palms for years now this thing has 'lockin' written all over it.
As an end user gadget it looks ok. I'd have to handle one to get a feel for how much better it is over a normal PDA. However I'd be willing to bet it's not that much better. Certainly not worth being locked in, likely having your habits tracked, and whatever other type of nonsense that such a propitiatory device would have.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Computer screens? Newspapers? That's kind of a given, but not really impressive and not likely to drive prices down really fast. It's limited to "flat" screens of limited sizes, so even the R&D may slow down because of that.
Give us color E-Ink wallpaper, E-Ink cars (where a limit of only two colors won't be much of a problem as long as we can control the "pixels" to make motifs), etc. I imagine a white car with the hood, top, hatch and doors with white/black E-Ink panels for starters, where only minimal flex is required in the panels (imagine the E-Ink panel for the front left side, too curvy to introduce a new technology in a new sector IMHO).
"Saving" $300 Mio or $80 billion/year would also make other entities "loose" at least the same amount looking at all the printing industry and supporting businesses and where does that lead to?
Is there any modeling/simulaton of necessary resources to "run" a human population in a country in a sustainable fashion and what products/services are required and how would in this context such an e-book prioritized?
Sure ain't - it's total chaos, will lead to more chaos and that ship is gonna tank big time!
Enjoy the trip!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Sure, media producers like magazines and newspapers would save on printing and paper costs, but what about the effect on forest and paper industry? I'm from Finland and I've seen mill after mill being shut down and cities and towns losing as much as 20% of it's income as a result. (corp tax, loss of income for the workers resulting in less buying power and added social welfare costs).
Did someone try to take out the free wireless device in the kindle and insert it in a eee pc? wouldn't THAT be nice?
They'll be giving it away with an 8 gallon fill up in 2 years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm a little amazed that no one has linked to yesterday's XKCD.
Which all begs the real question, I think: Why doesn't Amazon give these things away? Increasing their use is really all to their advantage. It prevents people from sharing their books with their friends. Right now, if I buy a dead tree book it goes to my library or friends when I am done. Every time Amazon sells a kindle book, they lock out those other users and increase their potential revenue stream.
There is no way in hell that I will buy one of these kindles until it supports PDF and plaintext. Word docs would be a bonus too. I really don't understand why the media is so excited for the opportunity to give Amazon $350 to be locked into the Amazon format for books. DRM issues aside, not being able to read the material that I already have in formats I like make this a total non-starter.
But if they were giving them away I would be a lot more likely to try it, even with their own format. And if they can do that enough, the PDF will go away.
--
$tar -xvf
What're they going to do, throw jelly donuts and beer at us? I, for one, welcome our new jelly-donut-and-beer-throwing overlords.
They are completely different devices built and optimized for different uses.
The kindle:
- Has an e-ink reflective display that you can read in bright sunlight
- Has a battery life measured in days (or longer)
- Weighs about 10oz and is 1/3" thick
The netbook:
- Has a fast backlit display that sucks power continuously, and gets washed out in bright light
- Has a fast CPU that sucks power
- Sucks power - battery life of a few hours
- Weighs 2-3lb or more
Sure the netbook is general purpose, but that generality comes at the cost of excluding the display/power/weight advantages that make the Kindle a far better bet if what you actually want to do is read books/PDFs/etc on the couch, plane, beach or elsewhere.
The number of trees saved will probably be around zero, since newsprint's wood source is almost exclusively tree farms. If demand for wood from tree farms decreased, they'd probably be cut down and turned to some other use, like farms of the non-tree variety.
The other environmental effects are trickier to sort out. Paper, as you point out, uses lots of nasty chemicals. But then so does manufacturing electronics, and mining the various metals that go into electronics manufacturing. Disposing of electronics, even when they're recycled (usually in China) is a rather nasty business, too.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Most tree farms are on purely private, unregulated land. If it become uneconomical to continue them as tree farms, they'd probably be clear-cut and turned into non-tree farms.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
to send anonymous letter ?
(A fRIenD THAT wisheS yOu Well)
Call me a neanderthal, but I like newspapers. I'm unhappy at the thought that the day will come, and it will come, when I no longer get a Sunday newspaper, but something like a Sunday pdf that I look at on my laptop or my Kindle or whatever. My wife an I like flipping through the Sunday paper over pancakes, handing sections back and forth, pointing out stories to each other, she likes cutting coupons, flipping through the sales circulars. I just don't think all that works as well in E-form.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
I'm all excited about the kindle, but if newspapers use the kindle, what about my Sunday morning comics in color?
Zero. Logging occurs at the maximum possible rate allowed. And those trees are useful for a lot more than just paper. The price drop from a lack of wood pulp required for paper would allow other things to be made o wood more cheaply, thus bringing them more sales.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
The first electronic paper came from Xerox PARC. It was called Gyricon and was developed years before e-Ink. They were 10-20 years ahead of their time and stopped development just a few years before there was finally a market for the technology.
Here's more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyricon
I read a newspaper or magazine once and then recycle it, so I see a future incarnation of the Kindle (larger, flexible) as ideal for a periodical delivery mechanism.
I have a Sony eReader, and a 1st Generation Kindle. Doubtfull i'll be buying this new Kindle. The Sony is rubbish. The buttons are in the wrong place, you have to deal with it's leather case and the books available are few and far between. The Kindle however.. is a breath of fresh air. I love how it hangs off the Verizon network and downloads very quickly. It even feels good holding it - next page, back etc.. all in the right places. This won't replace the modern book. Here's the scenario: Techies - if you're reading technical books 9/10 you'll be scribbeling on them, highlighting passages, drawing circles etc.. as references to future projects or deployments. You'll then potentially go "Hey dBag - read this" to a colleague. They take a beating - Kindles do not work well with this. Vacation - i took my Kindle to a beach in the Indian ocean (Zanzibar) over xmas, and Kindles do not like the sand. It still works, but i was very cautious with it. It was GREAT not to have to hold pages back becase the wind was blowing it. Big fan of Kindle, but by no means a replacement for good old time-tested paper and ink. - RC
www.redcu.be
Exactly.
* Buying the book on Half.com: $5 after shipping, and it's mine forever to donate, loan, or carve out and hide whiskey inside
* Renting the book from Amazon: $10, not including amortizing the cost of the $300 device?! Also requires battery power.
eBook rentals restricted in such a manner should cost substantially less if anything. The weight savings is not worth that much to me. I'll carry around the dead tree version.
The book industry is retarded and frustrating to me. Here's one fun thing my University does:
* Hire Pearson Custom Publishing to compile a book containing 3 chapters each of 4 books
* Buy this book for somewhere in the range of $48-$64 based on the information on Pearson's site
* Require this book and sell it for $162 (paperback!!), telling the students you're saving them the cost of buying 4 books
Since it's a custom compilation you can't get it anywhere online used. But the 4 component books are each available for under $15 on Half.com, and then I get the whole book instead of just three chapters of it, AND I can resell them later. Well, thanks for that.
I would feel motivated to cut off the binding and scan each page & seed it as a torrent.
Now all we need is e-Toilet Paper and we'll start making some real headway on saving the forests!
It comes down to greed.
They will still make their $ back at a more reasonable per unit price of $150, it would just take a little longer. But not 2x as long as they would sell even more.
Lower prices on a good product = more sales over the long haul.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Never benefited anyone.
Ok, perhaps the porn industry...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With DRM, your license to read the content lasts exactly as long as the copyright holder wants it to. In this "profitable future," public libraries won't be able to keep archives of periodicals.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Our startup spent $68 million in 4 years. The VC eventually gave the company away for FREE rather that continue funding it.
Another Bio tech I was at spent $25 million in 6 months and the VC decided to with draw. This after over a $100 mill had been put in.
For how long it took, what they produced in the end and what it will eventually make they got a deal.
Q: Why will the Kindle never replace the newpaper?
A: Ever tried swatting a fly with a Kindle?
First seen, IIRC, with 'TV' in place of 'Kindle'
On another subject, I am the only one who thinks of 'kindling' whenever I hear of this device? Yet another application that it can't replace newsprint in.
If the problem is un-costed negative externalities, it seems that the sanest way to fix the problem is to assign prices to the externalities through some sort of political body. I suppose you could do it yourself through viligantism, by assigning a "price" to negative externalities via sabotage or extortion, but that doesn't seem superior.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Source
Faye: "It's a little known fact that every Canadian citizen is born with a sharp, serrated edge somewhere on their body as protection from polar bears and enraged Quebecois."
Marten: "Every night they quietly hone their blades, biding their time until the Great Curling, when they will cleanse the earth of all other nations. That's why they're all so polite- they know we're all doomed eventually."
In other news, Microsoft Windows users are now covered under the Americans with Disabilties Act...
If physical books are no longer printed or printed in far smaller runs, this means that the secondary market collapses.
Well of course, that's rather the whole point of the kindle and why publishers adopt books for it.
Though if they were smarter they'd make the Kindle books cheaper instead of more expensive, to drive adoption through the roof. Thankfully they are not that smart.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is just another attempt at turning book ownership into the same thing music ownership has become
With Apple finally having killed music DRM, the music world is as open as we can ever hope it to be.
Now if you want to compare it to digital video ownership, that would probably be a lot more close to the situation at hand.
The question is if there's some kind of path that leads to DRM free books the same way music was able to find a way. Sadly, I see books as more like video than music and so even if there is a path it may take a ton of time to get there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yet Another Broken Window Fallacy
They will get better-paying jobs in more productive activities.
It took a caveman at least one day of work to make a chipped stone knife. A worker in a factory makes several thousand knifes each day using automated machines. Do you consider that a loss?
Netbooks have a fraction of the battery life, are heavier, are bigger, and are harder to read for long periods of time.
You've forgotten that because the Netbook has more features and buttons it automatically "wins".
Never mind usability.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
how about all the trees burned to make
power to power these thirsty things.
They want power, more power, ever more power.
How green is that?
give me a book that I don't need a battery for
everytime.
Except the it presume the shop keep would spend his 6 francs.
In modern business, that is not always the case.
the fallacy is about an non-budgeted expense, so you can only discuss if the shopkeepers would have had another non-budgeted expense to replace that one.
Since we are talking about non-budgeted must have items, then it is likely he will have those expenses ANYWAYS; regardless if he had a broken window or not. Meaning if he HAS to get shoes he will spend another six francs on shoes along with he six francs he spent to get his glass replaced.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ask Winnie Mandela.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie_Mandela)
The size and resolution of the screen on the Kindle 2 is identical to the Sony PRS 500, released November 1, 2006.
E-ink had the screens (and eval kits) long before that.
Adding more shades of gray is not making the display vastly better. Making it the 8 inch diagonal that is a modern paperback and losing the wasted real estate (42% of the top surface area of the kindle 2 is NOT screen) would be an innovation.
Sorry Amazon, no money for you. I'll keep my PRS 500 and wait for a paperback sized display, not a ripoff of 3+ year old tech.
Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle
Nothing can save the New York Times. Well, ok, maybe Nationalization, or a taxpayer bailout, or, God forbid, wholesale conversion into a politically conservative paper.
The paper has to put in the SAME ad to everybody. The kindle would put in an ad TARGETING a person. I do not want ads that target MS loving, KKK, neo-cons types. I would not buy that stuff. OTH, there are PLENTY of ppl who support all that. So instead, I would get ads for Linux, Education, High Tech items.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why should I buy an e-book reader? Show me one with the following abilities:
1) Has 600 DPI+, not 167 DPI. 167 DPI is about as pleasant as a 60 Hz CRT.
2) Allows me to put any files, from any creators, in any format I want to read on it, WITHOUT MANDATORY DRM. Pdfs, rtfs, plain text, Word docs, whatever.
3) Allows me to have access to the underlying OS as I see fit.
The ONLY significant thing the Kindle has over a netbook is a (slightly) more pleasant screen - e-ink vs. LCD and 167 DPI vs. 100 DPI. They both still suck for long extended reads, but I can access the internet, read any docs I feel like, do some coding or play simple games on a netbook. Perhaps someone should stick an e-ink screen on a netbook?
In the meanwhile, I'm keeping my books. And git off my lawn.
I want a Kindle, just not for $349. I'm looking for some kind of reduced price (not likely). I'm also looking forward to [http://www.plasticlogic.com/product.html]
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
at Xerox PARC, who also blew that development as well other more notable computer advances.
It's been more than 30 years, and the stuff still isn't in high volume mass production. Meanwhile LCD gets better and better for reading, and at 10X lower cost structure, with volumes in the billions it's just a matter of whether it hits in 2010 or 2011.
Just type in H0H0H0 .... it seems to accept it. Apparently this is the postal code for Santa Claus - so when kids mail letters, the post office knows what to do with them.
I have no idea why I know this.
--Nick.
Nowadays where everything gets calculated into CO2 - how would the trees calculate in CO2 saved? Could they just sell CO2-certificates and give everyone a kindle2 for free?
(and is it able to light my chimney, as its name suggests?)
I've been buying technical literature as much as I can lately as PDF files. Partly because they are cheaper and I was not liking the pile of books in boxes in the garage that are now obsolete, taking up space and I don't know what to do with them.
Beyond being able to send MS Word, HTML, TXT and images there are converters for PDF and other ebook formats that once converted will make them available over your wireless network. True the formatting of these methods tends to get munged but are quite readable.
Last night I bought an Oreilly PDF about Facelets, sent it to the email address of the Kindle and within minutes was comfortably reading.
As for the tiresome rants about DRM from the basement dwelling, mouth breathing geeks that know nothing about a Kindle...
Re-read the above, read more about what this thing can do, look at one, note my sig
And get off my lawn!
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
-Benjamin Disraeli
The format of books (a physical object that can be held easily and contains good reading content) is a widely accepted and well liked UI. It is no wonder that eBooks are and will continue to get more and more popular. This is definitely the wave of the future. People will be sipping on their coffee and reading the news on their eReaders. Personally, I think this format will suffer if we were to try to add too many other more features to it other than book and news material. It wouldn't be a good idea to compete with portable handheld devices (like phones and cameras, etc).
They still have yet to offer it with a case that has "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly (green) letters on the cover.
I think the massive development costs for epaper are unwarranted. It was a great idea, but too hard to do, and people's minds were already set on doing it in the old microcapsule way.
The OLPC screen designed by Mary Lou Jepsen is pretty great - the only issue is that the material on the back of the screen reflects the light at too pure an angle - if it were a bit more diffuse it would be a perfect e-paper alternative. In sunlight or bright ambient light it's incredible, and it's quite low power. If color is needed, at the cost of a bit of fuzziness it can display color images and video very well.
I'm keeping my eye on her new project, Pixel Qi. Personally though, I've been happy reading books on my HandSpring Visor, Sony Clie PEG-SJ33, PSP (with homebrew "KittyBook"), and now Stanza on my iPod Touch. I don't really need a paperlike display since I grew up reading textfiles on my home PC anyway.
Ah, but if he has more money, he may buy more expensive shoes. Also, if he keeps his money at a bank, the bank will reinvest that money by lending it to someone else. Or did you think the bank just sits on money deposited there? Banks have but a small fraction of total deposits available in the form of tangible cash.