It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as screen display technology gets better and lets tablets steal some of the screen-readability and battery life benefits of e-readers. Will dedicated e-readers stay around? Will they get so cheap that people treat them as disposable? Will tablets get that cheap?

It’s amazing how much the prices on big-screen high-definition TVs have come down over just the last few years. I regularly talk to people in my “day job” who paid a thousand bucks for a TV that has an equivalent costing less than half that today. Electronics prices can drop fast if enough economy of scale is applied.

So far, we haven’t really gotten to that point with tablets yet (perhaps, aside from the display issue, because only two tablets have ever really taken off marketwise). But sooner or later, we will. If nothing else, Amazon has a pretty big incentive to make both e-ink and tablet devices as cheap as possible so it can sell more e-books and movie streaming.

Alexander’s argument basically boils down to the fact that e-ink is an intermediate step, a necessary compromise between readability and display quality. E-ink is evolving toward being able to present color and full motion video, he suggests—and when you have an e-reader that can do that, it won’t be an e-reader anymore, but rather a tablet.

And really, the naming of these devices, the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet/Color, is resounding evidence of the looming death of dedicated readers. The Fire is sharing the Kindle name not only because it helps in marketing a new product, but because the concepts are on an inevitable path toward merging. The e-ink Kindle is limited, but with the converging technology in displays, its brand and legacy will live on in an entirely different form. The e-ink Kindle and Nook will fall into a niche category, while tablets (or similar) will continue to thrive.

The craze for the fire-sale TouchPads, Alexander suggests, shows that consumers are only putting up with e-readers but what they really want are tablets. (I know that my uncle, who prior to last Christmas was quite pleased with his 3G Kindle Keyboard, is now looking to sell it and buy a Kindle Fire like the one he got for his wife and then fell in love with himself.) E-readers are just a “stopgap” to tide people over until tablets get good enough, and it looks like they’ll be there before long.

This reminds me of what happened to PDAs. They used to be the mobile computing device. but they gradually vanished as smartphones took over everything they could do and added communication capability too. Now phoneless PDA devices like the iPod Touch and the Galaxy Player are very much the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps that future is coming for e-readers, too, if tablets can get good enough and inexpensive enough to take over the niche.

Might be a good deal for anyone in the market for (or wanting to gift) an e-ink touchscreen reader, if you can get one before they sell out.

It would appear to be halfway between a smartphone and a tablet. It reads ebooks but is that its main draw and in our opinion it fails on some basic counts. It is not a smartphone. Size wise it falls uncomfortably between the new smartphones and today’s tablets. The screen technology may now offer colour but anyone who has a Amoled screen will know this game has already been decided and the winner is here today. Finally the price is sitting on the high side of unattractive.

It seems a little puzzling to me just who would want a five- or six-inch device anyway. They’re a little bit too big to pocket easily, but not big enough to show even as much as a Kindle Fire can. And for the price, you could have a Kindle Fire instead with a hundred bucks left over for a year of Amazon Prime and an e-book or two. Is there really a market for this?

Spokesmen for Amazon, which is replacing the damaged Kindles, insist that X-raying your Kindle is perfectly safe. “Many Kindle users travel by air, and their Kindles are screened by airport security every day without issue.” And they’re probably right, or else we’d be seeing an uproar tantamount to Apple’s “antennagate”.

Still, I suspect more than a few Kindle owners are going to hesitate next time they have to surrender their e-readers to an airport scanner.

On GigaOm, Kevin C. Tofel presents a 10-second YouTube video of a demo of the e-ink technology, showing a screen scrolling around on a website. It looks pretty good; comparable to what it looks like to scroll around on a standard LCD screen except in black and white.

Tofel is glad to see the company is still around and innovating, but wonders whether Bookeen’s device sporting the new technology, the Cybook Odyssey, will make it to the US where Kindle, Nook, and Kobo pretty much have the market sewn up.

I would be more inclined to wonder, if it does make it to the US, if it will make it in the US. Though no price has yet been announced, I would imagine the device will have to cost more than equivalently-sized current-generation readers that don’t scroll, and will anybody really want to pay that much for a third-party reader? People don’t seem to have any problem reading e-books a page at a time on current devices, and especially in this economy people are very conscious of price. (Certainly that’s where Amazon is competing with its Kindle.)

Perhaps it might be better, financially, for Bookeen to concentrate on licensing its technology to the other companies that are in a position to sell many more units. But I guess we’ll see.

I have my doubts that Sony is going to have staying power in the e-reader biz for much longer, but perhaps it will surprise me. At any rate, if you have a thing for the Sony Reader, have a blast.

The device costs €165 (equivalent to $240 US) on that website, and will probably be a bit cheaper when and if it’s introduced here—but can it be cheap enough to compete with all the e-readers that are now clustering around the $100 mark and preparing to plunge even lower?

Now it comes out that Plastic Logic is producing e-readers again, and the first 1,000 of them will be part of a pilot program testing e-readers in Russian schools. The tablets run 12,000 Roubles (about $420 US) each; if the program takes off, providing tablets to Russia’s 52,000 schools could be rather lucrative. Perhaps more so than trying to compete with the Kindle and the iPad in the American market.

I suppose it’s a sign of just how deep some memes have their claws in me that I now have to resist the temptation to make an “in Soviet Russia” joke about e-readers reading you.

(Found via PaidContent.)

Can you imagine that? Potentially 30 million new e-ink e-book readers could be manufactures by the end of the year using screens from just this one company. Hard to believe that just a few years ago we were all wondering if e-readers would ever take off.

(Found via eBookNewser.)

The source of the rumor is not exactly the most reputable possible, but it’s an interesting idea to consider. As I suggested a few weeks back, such a configuration could provide the answer to people being unable to see the cover to the e-book you’re reading. But on the other hand, it would seem to make it harder to set such a device down on any flat surface—current e-readers or tablets have a metal or plastic back that doesn’t matter if it gets scuffed, but a Janus-faced tablet would always have one screen in danger of scuffing.

We’ll just have to see what it looks like when it comes out. Zatz reports the tablet had originally been slated to launch in July, but delays have pushed it back to August.

(Found via E-Reader Info.)

This looks like it could be a very useful alternative to the Kobo or Kindle for people who don’t need store compatibility or all the bells and whistles, and the $99 price point of the old Kobo Wireless could make it a good impulse buy. I’m pretty happy with my old Kobo so far. Of course, Kobo is still at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the Kindle or Nook given the trouble its chain retail store partner Borders is having.

E-books could be displayed in the ink format, while pictures and video could use the full-color LCD-screen. While a similar duality of purpose can be found in switchable displays like the Pixel Qi screens we’ve mentioned a few times, this Apple-patented system would go one better in that it would allow text to be displayed in e-ink and color pictures to be displayed in LCD at the same time.

Of course, such a display would probably still have the backlight eyestrain problem some attribute to LCD (in that you’re reading by looking into an emitting light source rather than a reflected one). And for that matter, is a translucent e-ink layer even possible? I thought e-ink modules had to be black or white. But I suppose if it is possible, Apple will find a way to do it.

Also worth noting is that the 2-year e-reader protection plan package is marked down from $50 to $20. Ordinarily I wouldn’t buy those on anything less than a HDTV (and after having worked tech support for HDTVs, I definitely would recommend buying them for HDTVs, but that’s another story), but this protection plan also included a zipper case, screen protector, and screen wipes. The protection is provided by a third party so it will remain valid even if Borders goes under entirely.

After work today, I was curious to see whether the Borders in Springfield, MO had any of these readers in stock, so I nipped over to check it out. And I discovered that they actually had a good number of them. Perhaps bargain-hunters have not been attracted to more expensive items. At any rate, this bodes well for people in other areas with closing Borders that would like to get their hands on them. They did only have one of the protection plan packages left, and figuring that the case and screen protector were probably worth that by themselves, I went ahead and splurged.

I look forward to trying the reader out. I’m given to understand that it’s a pretty decent little EPUB-compatible gizmo (or at least the non-wireless one that Joanna reviewed is, so this one should be even better). I’m not sure how useful the wireless access will be—is it possible to browse the web with this thing?—but as a reader for all my unprotected EPUB files it might just prove first-rate. I’m thinking that after I’ve played with it a while, I’ll follow Joanna’s example and loan it to my parents to see what they think. Maybe I can get my Dad to write a guest review from his non-techie perspective.

Glory H from Dubuque, IA; and

Paul Milke from Uxbridge, MA!

E Ink has been notified, and the watches will be winging their way to you guys! Everyone join me in Congratulations to our winners!

The watch contest did well! Most interestingly, I’ve gotten some very interesting responses for the write-in portion of the contest, asking what people would like to see in the sequel to Verdant Skies. I plan to respond to many of those write-ins, just to acknowledge them, or possibly to discuss their ideas. And I can assure you that some of them are well within the concept of Verdant Skies that they can be used to some extent. I may just ask my readers to give me ideas for all my future books!