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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."
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"
We're animals. We are at the top of the food chain. If other species cannot adapt to survive, they won't.
I'm interested in how to protect us, not endangered animal species.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."