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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."
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)...
> 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.
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.
Like pretty much any other invention in the history of humanity, it may cost someone his (before, profitable) business model, but ultimately it benefits everyone on a much larger scale. This goes for telephone, automobile, airplane, TV, Internet...
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
except that theory indicates the harm to the first business. In this case, the first business' business model is broken - (subscription based-news) due to technology. Lowering costs does not fix the business model. If you want to salvage a newspaper, they HAVE to rethink their model.
Shall I send you a buggy whip, sir?
The math is simple. Say your subscription to the NY Times costs $1 per day, $365 per year. That's a Kindle. Even if you replace them every two years, and pay retail for them (which are both unlikely) you're still coming out on top if you give them away.
I'm sorry, but we shouldn't support a business model if it's grossly inefficient, not in this day and age.
Anyone able to translate that into number of trees saved?
Once again, these trees are not from clear-cut tropical forests made into farmland for subsistence farming. These trees are most likely in areas managed by forestry companies who plant at least as many trees as they cut.
There are regulations in western countries and the forestry companies would be putting themselves out of business if they cut down all the trees.
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.
So let me get this right: because there's currently a plan associated with gathering a resource, it is wrong to economize the use of that resource? And that companies deserve protection from becoming obsolete?
No, he's saying that because there's currently a plan associated with gathering a resource that's directly proportional to it's replacement that economizing use will not "save trees". If demand goes down fewer trees will be cut and hence fewer will be planted. The trees saved are those that would never have been planted. Trust me that those that find vast percentages of their land not profitable due to increased supply will still chop down the trees and perhaps do something more economically viable with the land.
Buggy-whips and Whale-bone are simply not in demand. Leather for the whips diverted to other things and whale bones are as well.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Netbooks have a fraction of the battery life, are heavier, are bigger, and are harder to read for long periods of time.
Try to spend 12 hours on the beach reading from a netbook, and from a Kindle. You'll see the difference.
wouldn't be the first industry a union rode into oblivion by refusing to accept the inevitable changes brought by technology.
Trees can be replaced easily. Forest ecosystems can't. If we use fewer trees, we can let some tree farms begin the slow, slow process of returning to being actual forests.
A tree farm is NOT a forest.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Good point about sequestration, at least if the trees are not burned. Of course, there are other reasons to save them. On the practical side, it's very difficult to cut them down without causing erosion, topsoil loss, destruction of complex and far-reaching ecosystems associated with habitat loss, etc... But perhaps more importantly, there are also interesting quality-of-life issues involved with destroying things of great beauty. At what point is it just not worth cramming a few billion more people onto an ugly planet?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Not only does it save trees but the chemistry involved in making paper is horrible. Even with new process'
The process for making plastic, circuit boards, and e-paper in the kindle is cleaner how?
I drive past a tree farm on a regular basis. If it were shut down, it wouldn't return to forest. It would return to semi-desert scrubland. The only reason there's a tree farm there is because it's just up the hill from the fourth-largest river in the United States. Most places where trees are farmed for paper are like this: take a chunk of cheap land with good irrigation, plant a bunch of fast-growing trees, and harvest them every 15 years or so.
Trees farmed for lumber are different: since they grow slowly and need to be larger to produce worthwhile products, they're usually grown in places where trees would naturally grow.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Speaking as a collector of antiquarian books; made of linen paper and just as fine today as they were 300-400 years ago when they were made, I find this curious. I also wonder in 300-400 years how well the kindle interface will work compared to a standard bound book.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.