Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

The iPad is the best thing that could have happened to eReaders.

1. It’s competitive enough to scare most eReader companies into greatly improving their products.
2. At the same time it’s not good enough (or to be precise – not focused on reading enough) to kill off eReaders completely.

At this point you can’t look at iPad detractors or iPad supporters as delusional. Which is perhaps the biggest sign that eReaders are not going to be killed by the iPad.  

There is no amazing new feature that makes the iPad a must-get and definitely nothing tailored to reading that’s revolutionary.

However, 

1. There are enough people who will buy an iPad because they were waiting for it (or they love Apple or other reasons) to make the iPad a threat.
2. The $499 price is low enough to attract a lot of the people considering paying $250 for an eReader.
3. The App Store and the Apple iPhone OS is much better than anything eReaders have.

So, let’s look at what iPad might do to eReaders and what eReaders should do in return.

What impact will the iPad have on eReader sales?

Here’s my gut reaction -

1. Kindle 2 – 30% of sales lost. 
2. Nook – 40% of sales lost. Nothing personal against the Nook – it’s because they made their color LCD such a big deal and attracted people who value color screens.
3. Sony Reader – 30% of sales lost. 
4. Kindle DX – 50% or more of sales lost. 
5. Other Larger eReaders – 50% or more of sales lost.

There’s no way to justify this because it’s all predictions and assumptions.

However, if you were to say the small screen eReader estimates are too high and the large screen eReader estimates are too low you’d probably be right.

How should eReaders respond?

Let’s start with the smaller eReaders.

What do 6″, $259 eReaders do to compete with the iPad? 

Well, it’s rather simple -

1. First, improve the value for money users get. Bump the price down to $199 and add more features.
2. Second, improve the screen technology i.e. better contrast, touch capabilities, unbreakable screens, faster refresh speed.
3. Third, Color – Color brings a lot of sex appeal.
4. Fourth, make eReaders better for reading things other than books – that includes a better web browser, better PDF support, and support for comics.
5. Fifth, Content – Focus on increasing the range of content and making prices better.

Perhaps the single biggest thing is to open up their platform to eReader Apps.

1. No company can compete with hungry developers that might not get to eat if they don’t create something great.
2. You get tens of thousands of minds working on improving your product.
3. You have people create apps that cater to specific sections of your customer base.

The small screen eReaders are very well placed – They basically got a big reminder of the importance of evolving constantly. 

2-3 months is a lot of time

There’s a lot that can be done in 2-3 months. There’s also a lot more that can be done in 6 months – including a complete product cycle or a huge new feature.

Here are some random ideas (assuming a 6 month timeline) -

1. Speed up eReader App Stores and get them out. Even 5 really good apps are worth a lot if they’re Folders, Font Support, PDF Zooming, ePub support, and a Comic Reader.
2. Keep adding Apps – There are at least a thousand different excellent app ideas for eReaders. Perhaps some of them only appeal to 5,000 people – However it would make eReaders absolutely irreplaceable for those 5,000 people.
3. Release a line of Color eReaders. Yes, we know it’ll be more expensive – However, there are some people who are fixated on color.
4. Don’t ditch cheap black and white eReaders – Low Price is your big advantage.
5. Revolutionize the interface – the keyboards and touch screens and LCD helper screens are all a disgrace.
6. Make the screen unbreakable and flexible – That would be a huge jump and could even be turned into an advantage. 
7. Actually get eInk in front of people – Most people have no clue that eInk is much better than LCD.
8. Make it a battle on device prices and book prices and value for money and total cost of ownership.

Most of all eReader companies have to keep improving their product and service for readers and for reading.

Start understanding the Psychological Battle and Start Fighting It

eReaders are competing with someone who has perhaps the best knowledge of human psychology and a ridiculous amount of experience actually exercising that knowledge.

eReaders have to start appealing to people’s emotions and their heart. Most of all they have to figure out what psychological buttons are being pushed and un-push them.

If there are ‘I’m an iPad and I’m an eReader’ commercials there better be someone filming a juggling clown on a tricycle next to a unitasking doctor saving someone’s life.

What do large screen eReaders do?

Can’t really offer any advice here – the problems should be painfully obvious.

Large Screen eReaders will be fine as soon as they cut their prices by 40-50%.

If 10″ eReaders with identical functionality are priced 70-100% higher than 6″ eReaders then you don’t need me to tell you something’s wrong.

Is it time to stand up to the Delusionaries?

You know what – it’s time we stopped letting the ‘anything we touch becomes revolutionary’ delusionaries bully us around.

We don’t have to make a loser’s choice and restrict ePaper to single purpose ePaper devices.

eReaders are great for what they do and we want our single purpose devices. Perhaps eReaders have siblings and perhaps they can learn to multi-task in more ways than one.

It’s time for ePaper based multi-purpose devices

There are companies that are leveraging ePaper for multi-purpose devices – for example, Notion Ink’s Adam Tablet.

We need more – Amazon should seriously consider setting up another team that goes after the iPad. Not with a ‘it’d be nice to try this out’ attitude - No. We need a ‘so much fresh blood - must drink blood’ attitude.

Asus and Acer and Dell and HP should consider going after the iPad too – using ePaper. Definitely by holiday season.

1. If nothing else an ePaper based Tablet would win on battery life.  
2. ePaper would be readable in bright sunlight. 
3. You have a lot of weapons like going open and giving people flexibility.
4. You can always compete on price.

Start with ePaper based multi-purpose devices and then move up to ePaper based high-end devices.

Steve Jobs is crowing about how Apple is a $50 billion company – Well, $50 billion companies tend to get fat and content and lazy. They get more and more caught up in what used to make them successful and their own eco-system and how great they are.

Enough talk of Kindle Killers and eReader Killers – it’s time for ePaper based Killers.

Filed under: iSlate Apple Slate Tagged: | future of ereader, ipad vs ereader