While I tend to agree that color isn’t a vital piece of the design, this overstates the case something fierce. You mean no one ever made a book with a useful 3″x4″ color plate? Or even several? I doubt that.

Contrariwise, a well done 3″x4″ b&w illustration, similar to those done for oh, the two or three hundred years before color printing became common, should be fine for most purposes.

Excessive hyperbole is a little much, don’t you think?

Regards,
Jack Tingle

This means that e-readers may well converge toward adopting more media-player functionality as well.

Isn’t there enough of this other “media” already? While I can’t speak for ever one, I have zero interest in a portable “media” player — just give me the books. I like the single functionality of my Kindle.

If eInk can roll out color screens, they can display textbooks in color, as they are today.

The 6″ form factor on Kindles, Sony, and Nook will be too small to truly utilize pictures and graphics for textbooks which is why color screens for ereaders are moot.

On the other hand, multimedia texts would be more costly, and with tight margins in education the way they are, we might not see that kind of innovation for quite some time. So eInk could have plenty of shelf-life left.