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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."
'What we've got here is a technology that could be saving the world $80 billion a year,' Wilcox says."
Anyone able to translate that into number of trees saved? Not only does it save trees but the chemistry involved in making paper is horrible. Even with new process'. http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=1188&content_id=CTP_003400&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=b6dfb0f1-988d-4fd1-96e3-8856d0b81993
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Your argument seems to me like an instance of the Broken Window Fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window.
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 Motorola F3 has a (fairly rudimentary) E-Ink display, and only costs about $25 for an unlocked handset.
If they can get these things in a lot of devices, the $150mil R&D should be easily recoverable. Remember that the Kindle also includes a wireless modem, storage, and a decent amount of processing power.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Har har har... burning a Canadian Tire...
For people not from Canada: http://www.canadiantire.ca/
Purell this week announces that it is suing Amazon and E-Ink for disrupting their hand sanitizer <del>racket</del>business.
0xfeedface
I'm sorry, you are the one that's working under an incorrect assumption.
You ASSUME you'll be able to BUY a Kindle2. ;-)
The Kindle 1 was almost never in stock...and I looked often.
It was always on a pre-order basis.
WTF? Over?
As a fellow book cheapskate I agree that is a little frightening. Hopefully the efficiency of electronic delivery, combined with the market forces of supply and demand, will force e-publishers to lower their prices after a book is a few months old. (Though I realize this has been a long-running issue with iTunes with many objecting to graduated pricing.)
If nothing else, look at it this way, somebody will build a lego Mindstorms robot to turn the pages on Kindle so you can scan it in and upload it to bittorrent without even cutting the spine off, take that DRM :) PS if you want me to implement this cool hack please gift me a new Kindle 2, I want one.
Why? trees saved means nothing. Most paper come from managed forests that are replanted after harvest.
Most of the destructive tree cutting comes from land clearing for useless things like Golf courses, Subdivisions, Farms, and industry.
The logging industry is the most "GREEN" industry you can get, they understand conservation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually, I don't think you went far enough.
Kindle2 == Steak knife (good at one thing)
Netbook == Swiss Army Knife (pretty good at a BUNCH of things)
Kindle2 price is equivilent to a Netbook
For me, the netbook makes more sense for the money.
If the Kindle was $50, then fine.
But it's too much for a single purpose item of that sort.
WTF? Over?
Old growth forests have maximized the amount of carbon they will ever sequester and don't even really provide a lot of oxygen to the environment (compared to other sources). Cutting them down is not inherently bad, as long as you aren't freeing up that carbon--if you're making paper or wooden products out of the trees (two-by-fours, chairs, whatever), it's fine.
At any rate, American logging companies at least plant more trees than they ever plan to harvest.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Congratulations, that was "Informative." =P :)
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
I've not held one nor seen one update the screen, so I can't speak to those attributes. But I have seen the screen and it is nothing like black text on bright white paper. It's like black text on drab gray paper, it's too low contrast to have any appeal over a printed book. If the reader was priced at $9.99, and a had large selection of $1-$2 books were available (pot-boilers and other commuter fare), I think it would take over the world in short order, but it's just not nearly as user friendly for most people as a book. For blind people and those with the kinds of motor function impairments that make holding a book or turning the pages difficult or impossible it is probably a great improvement, so I wouldn't say it will have no market after the fad fades. And it is of course possible that the display quality and price will improve greatly in the next year or two.
In the case of Indonesia, the rainforest is being cut illegally to supply China with wood and paper (and hence US bound products). You can't just "replant" an ecosystem like a rainforest because it has a lot of fragile symbiotic relationships. Once its gone, it becomes cattle grazing land (see australia or southern mexico for examples).
This is why Forest Stewardship Council lumber and paper products should be promoted. http://www.fsc.org/
You somehow forgot to mention that it requires a freaking booklight to read in the dark.
Yeah, that's because it doesn't shine a powerful backlight right into your eyes - which is not good for the eyes in general, and particularly so if you do that in darkness.
Seriously, do not stare into bright screens when the environment is dark (such as reading from a lit screen at night in a room with no lights). No color combination will solve this problem, though some are better than others (as you say yourself). If you care about your vision, then keep in mind that the only right way to read is with a proper external light source, correctly positioned - such as, yeah, a book light :)
By the way, the thing doesn't have its own backlight because of the nature of "e-paper"/eInk screens - they are reflective, not transparent. Both white and black pixels on those are particles of solid matter. It makes it impossible to do proper backlight, but it is also what gives them the "paper look" and that long battery life (because once all the particles are set appropriately, they persist without need to apply any energy).
Much of the logging that is done leads to tree farms, but not all of it (for instance, the majority of North America has been logged at least once). This is somewhat related to it being rather difficult to farm hardwoods (they die a lot, and grow funny, mitigating the benefits of nice neat rows).
Even if logging ceased, there are all sorts of more subtle things to worry about, like worms:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=invasive-earthworms-denude-forests
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I live adjacent to 250 acres of tree farm. It *is* a forest. No doubt about that. Around 1900, it was a sheep farm completely devoid of trees. Now only clear-cutting would keep it from becoming more of a forest.
And the dead trees from it keep my house warm in winter via my two woodstoves. I use less than 200 gallons of heating oil per year to keep my house warm.
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein