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iLiad e-reader’s price: $13.20 a month–if bundled via a book club deal? (Speculation)
February 14, 2006 | 7:33 am
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By David Rothman
The price of the iLiad, the forthcoming E Ink machine from iRex Technologies, would be US$480 for subscribers to a newspaper in Belgium–tied to a bundling arrangement.
To be a little more exact, bundling deals conceivably might take the iLiad to a tad less–around $476, plus the cost of the content. And maybe still lower.
Hmm. Could Book of the Month or a similar outfit have something on tap involving the iLiad or the rival Sony Reader? Let’s see. $476 divided by 36 = $13.20 a month. Is this how book clubs might aim for a three-year lock-in, even if the price might have to be higher because of the cost of the money? The three-year book cub possibility for the iLiad is strictly my speculation, inspired by a 12-month deal that the Filament Book Club offers buyers of an eBookwise-style machine. But the mention of $476 as a bundled price comes from DeepRex–someone knowledgeable about the iLiad.
But how about the justification for the retail price of $700+ compared to the lower one for the Jinke/Hanlin machines and the almost surely lower price for the Sony?
DeepRex notes that the Hanlin and Sony machine use six-inch displays. while the iliad’s display is eight inches. And he says display size can impact price in a major way. If everything else is identical, a display a third bigger would more or less lead to a product a third more expensive–at least as a rough rule of thumb. DeepRex also mentions the iLiad’s wireless connections as adding to the cost.
As for the iLiad cost vs. the price of a Tablet PC, he says that is a bad comparison because the former is optimized for reading, while the Tabet PC is not. Also, he says that E Ink at this point does not lend itself well to interactivity. Simply put, you should avoid the iLiad if you need to run the usual kinds of programs.
Note: An early version of this posting included a miscalculated currency conversion. Thanks to Marcus Sundman for catching my error.
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Comments:
“I would expect to see prices around 400E [about $335] for the HW”
What currencies are those supposed to be? 400 EUR = 476 USD at the moment.
Marcus, where would I be without you and all those other sharp-eyed readers? Yes, I rechecked the calculation and your figure is correct. I’ve modified the post. Thanks. David
Two points:
The ebookwise 1150 retailed for 99$ when I bought it, and it’s still at $130. for the core base of existing readers, there has to be a compelling reason to switch from this device for public domain reading.
the more expensive a device becomes, the riskier it becomes to buy it. What if it breaks? Is saddled by DRM problems? Never gets enough commercial content? these are still cutting edge products, and nobody wants to be stuck with an expensive device that never quite caught on.
On the other hand, I’m guessing the Sony device will receive more visibility and user acceptance (warts and all). If people come in contact with these devices more often in everyday life, they might be more inclined to see more value in it.
the big thing is selling a device already loaded with content. Not only public domain stuff, but several mainstream titles (preferably of the owner’s choice). That suggests a need for collaboration with content providers.
Question for the mole:
Politely and kindly, of course.
But to our Volish Dutch Amigo:
Given that, contrary to the statement
on Iliad’s homepage, pretty much all ebook device companies (Palm, NuovoMedia, Franklin, Ebookwise, etc.) have attempted to merge hardware and content in a razors and blades model, in the process alienating independent publishers, enraging free book sites (don’t make me bring Eric Eldred in here), and failing pretty miserably at achieving their expected sales goals (after all, these days the top ebook retailer other than Amazon is Ellora’s Cave, not Fictionwise or Palm or whoever), why should we care about anything other than price of new e-ink device?
2-inches more of screens are great, but Sony’s going to blow your company away at marketing, and has a retail presence… beginning with its own stores. That firm’s “Itunes for ebooks” is also likely to fail, for reasons too dull to get into, but the device will likely predominate.
I speak here as both the proprietor of a wireless ebook site, and as the guy who with blackmask pretty much single-handedly put Mobipocket and the ex-gemstars over the top, and I gotta say, I don’t see much in the Iliad save “another E-ink device”–one that costs more.
Should the first Jinke/Sony/HP-maybe’s/whichever not include wireless, the second ones will, but while the Chinese are what they are, they are trying, they are listening, they are getting better, they are already much cheaper, and they come from a competitive environment that’s uniquely focused on bringing down costs.
From what I’ve seen of the Iliad, I could probably reformat everything on my sites to custom-fit your device with a batch script in like a weekend, but other than a slightly larger screen, I’m not detecting much that motivates me to do so.
In a competitive environment, cost matters.
David Moynihan
Disruptive Publishing
http://www.blackmask.com
http://www.olympiapress.com
“Hanlin and Sony are six-inch displays. iliad is an eight-inch display. The display is the main part of the cost of the product, so a good rule of thumb would be an iliad would be 30 percent more expensive than Hanlin and Sony, if other features remain equal.”
This got me to do some other calculations, too.
)
- An 8″ display is 78 % larger than a 6″ one.
- A 1024×768 display has 64 % more pixels than a 800×600 one.
- An 8″ 1024×768 display is 8 % less crisp (i.e. has larger pixels) than a 6″ 800×600 one.
(Not that anybody is interested or anything…
Actually this is interesting stuff, Marcus. Pricing of e-book devices is a major issue, and both you and DeepRex are examining the logic in the iLiad’s case. So thanks for your thoughtful comments (and for putting up with the brief mispelling of your name in the main post).
And to David Moynihan: I’d hate to see content and hardware tied to each other via Gemstar-style exclusives. But the book club approach might make sense in terms of newbies who can’t afford the e-book devices up front. What’s more, iLiad is doing the right thing in worrying about the easy availability of content. As for the Chinese, I agree with you totally: they are among the masters at price competition. In fact, I suspect this is one reason why iLiad may want to bring content into the mix. In fact, note the other just-posted item about the Chinese version of the iLiad–apparently at a much lower cost. I doubt they can match iRex in terms of the total quality of the user experience, at least not for now.
- David
I’d like to add a bit of speculation about the design of the iLiad that I think may be unique among the three E-Ink Readers:
If you follow a link to the “Chinese” iLiad from earlier posts (for example, here: http://www.baizhan.com.cn/index.php?showtopic=47080&mode=threaded&pid=57856) and take a close look at the enlarged pictures, you’ll notice that the long bar to the left of the iLiad’s screen appears to be recessed and that there is a tab that protrudes from this bar along its entire length. Additionally, if you look close at the top and bottom of the bar, there seems to be a slight curve downward on either side.
I’m guessing that this is the mechansim used to flip pages. Using your left thumb, you can quickly flick the bar to the right or left to move forward or back through pages. May not be earth-shattering, but it’s a nice concept (if actual) that may prove to be more ergonomic in design than the competing products, and further differentiates the iLiad from the Reader and the V8.
Don’t forget the digitizer!
I recall the Iliad will have a touch-screen. Librie, Sony eReader, Jinke V2, V8 do not (though the Jinkes do have a small touch screen on the bottom, separate from the eInk main screen).
Digitizers cost money. The digitizer is the principal reason that TabletPCs cost so much more than plain laptops.
I consider the addition of the digitizer to be a bit of a mistake for the Iliad, and they would have been well advised to have produced one model without it. For doctors and sales reps, the digitizer is a welcome addition, and the Iliad beats TabletPCs also in weight, which is an important consideration when you’re thinking about schlepping a device around with you all day long.
But for us ordinary readers? The touch-screen helps in surfing the web, but not in reading offline content (i.e., books instead of periodicals that would have hyperlinked ads embedded in them).
Pond, I like to take notes when reading my fiction, and don’t like schlepping a second device along just for that purpose. If I would buy an ebook reader, it should replace my PDA. If Sony weren’t off-limits for me because of its near-criminal practices, the lack of an input mechanism would still be a showstopper.
How expensive are touchscreens exactly?
Pretty cheap for the hardware – though there are obvious and unknown costs associated with integration and designing software that will make it function usefully.
To put a fine point on it – this isn’t a touchscreen – it is a tablet. The pen has a radio transmitter and the device triangulates to figure out where the pen is relative to the fixed transmitters. Sensor on the pen tip determines the mouse-click or pressure level.
I remember picking one of these babies up for drawing for around $200 – in 1994 – for my LCIII
E-Ink and a touchscreen? Probably complicated and very expensive…not going to be seeing that anytime soon.
Thanks JK, I did not know that!