Here’s some eReader, Kindle news for the mid of March 2010 -
Interview with new eInk CEO – Color eInk by end 2010, early 2011
Xconomy Boston has an interview with the new CEO of eInk, T. H. Peng, and Mr. CEO talks about the timeline for color eInk -
… customers want to launch our color e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011.
Hanvon … will design a color e-book reader using E Ink’s technology. They’ve raised a lot of money and …. deliver their new product, which will be in early 2011.
He also brings up a good point about reading on LCDs -
The iPad is not the first LCD-based e-book reader. More than 10 years ago, there were already a few e-book reading devices using LCD screens …
… we believe one of the key reasons (the products did not succeed) was that LCD screens do not provide a very good digital reading experience.
He also points out that there was no publishing infrastructure to support LCD eReaders at the time and that the devices were not ‘cool’.
Mr. Peng mentions that eInk are going to triple their capacity this year (they quintupled it last year), will hire 100 more people, and also are working on some ‘advanced projects’.
Korea Times – Korean eBook Market prospects uncertain
Got to love it when they start off their article on the Korean eReader market with this little gem -
If the U.S. market is any indication, prospects for the e-book market in Korea are not so promising.
Years after Amazon.com entered the e-book business, it has sold less than 3 million Kindle e-book reading devices, meaning less than 1 percent of the U.S. population are subscribers.
People seem to like the ’3 million’ figure and it’s become the de-facto Kindle sales figure.
The list of problems they spell out is pretty good and applies to the US market too -
- It’s an emerging market and no one knows what direction to go in.
- The upfront, high cost of eReaders.
- Lots of competition.
- A lot of content is needed to sell eReaders.
They also talk about the companies arriving in the Korean market and their strategies.
WorldReader working on getting Kindles to kids in poor countries
The WorldReader Blog (found courtesy Wired) talks about their Kindle for Ghanaian Kids experience -
Before leaving home, we had put 6 books on the Kindles we brought down:
By far the favorite, and the one that seemed most appropriate to their reading level, was Curious George, so we are going to try to get more later this week.
WorldReader’s stated aim is pretty interesting -
We deliver subsidized e-readers to under-served communities, and will drive down the cost of publishing local content.
We measure success through increased literacy rates, local content development, and business creation.
They also have strong connections with Amazon -
- Amazon is a partner.
- It’s co-founded by David Risher who used to be the Senior Vice President of Product and Platform Development at Amazon.
CrunchGear devote an entire article to talk about how skeptical they are about the project. I’m no expert on how to solve Africa’s problems so I’ll leave the arguments to Crunchgear.
Various other snippets
- International Herald Tribune’s Marie Benilde has an Op-Ed in the NY Times on The End of Newspapers. Apparently French newspapers are struggling as much as US ones.
- Readngo at the official kindle forum points out a fascinating survey from last year (January 2009) on the Literature Reading Habits of Americans.
- Lesley at the official kindle forum points us to 2 free indie horror books including Harvest by Steve Merrifield.
That’s all for this post.
Filed under: news Tagged: | kindle news
