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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.
Har har har... burning a Canadian Tire...
For people not from Canada: http://www.canadiantire.ca/
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.