Here’s the second part. Sorry, no dancing!
What does this mean for companies like Sony and Amazon who remain with e-ink products? I would suggest – nothing. As B&N said in the presentation there are enough e-ink people around so that B&N will not discontinue their original Nook.
You have to be careful of the press, especially the tech press which doesn’t have much of an understanding of how markets work. It likes to pit one technology against another and find a “killer”. Markets don’t work this way, especially nascent markets like the one that contains ereaders. Despite all the hype, the total number of ereaders is tiny and there is plenty of room for all sorts of new and different stuff. This means that there are many of niches to fill. The Nook Color will have little, if any, effect on Amazon or Sony. The people who are attracted to the Nook Color are not those who will be attracted to a Kindle, and vice versa. What is important is that a new class of ereaders will join us early adopters, develop a new class of users, and the total market will burgeon.
Kudos to B&N for realizing that the market is not monolithic.
They anticipate the Nook Color becoming the bestselling ereader on the market? That’s a tall order.
“You have to be careful of the press, especially the tech press which doesn’t have much of an understanding of how markets work. It likes to pit one technology against another and find a “killer”. Markets don’t work this way, ”
Exactly true. The techy nerdy types who write these articles (I read a lot of them …) are utterly hopeless at predicting any market trend. They are obsessed with functionality and gizmos and stuff that real people have no interest in. People will want a thin, light, easy to use, easy to read device to read books. if it does that then people will buy it.
I read on both an iPod touch and a Kindle 1, and agree that a tech press that thinks one or the other must win is misguided. It’s a bit like arguing, a century ago, whether the public would settle on a car or a truck as their vehicle of choice. It all depends on what you are doing.
The touch is like a sports car. It goes with me everywhere and is great for reading in places with poor lighting. The Kindle is more like a work truck. Except for the blasted misplaced buttons on the Kindle 1, reading on the Kindle is a much more pleasant experience because the pages are more like paper. In fact the Kindle screen is so much like paper, I’m thinking of using it for the paper-stage in book proofing, something I’d never do with a touch and probably not with an iPad.
It’s not the light so much as the glare that bothers me with LCD, like my laptop screen right now. I have a nice reflection of the window behind me, and my office faces north. Ugh.
The sunlight issue is also significant. Even if you’re not reading outside, when the sun shines in a window, you have to move around with an LCD screen, it makes no difference to an eInk screen.
When I was at an outside event, the difference became apparent. When I looked at my smart phone, I had to take my sunglasses off and shield the screen. When reading my Kindle, I didn’t have to do either.