So there have always been several things in the “way” of wide e-book adoption, and some are still there.

The first was reading experience, not surprisingly at 72 – 100 dpi (the range of most LCD displays and CRT monitors) there is significant eye strain that you don’t notice because you eye corrects your view, but ask someone who prints out source code to read it and you’ll find a person who consciously, or unconsciously, is being bothered by eyestrain. IBM in the 90′s showed that once a display got beyond 150DPI eyestrain dropped off a cliff, but they also noted that the electronics needed to drive a display with > 150 DPI at any reasonable size was “impractical” given the bandwidth and the need for a 50+hz refresh rate. Electrophoretic displays side step that problem because they are ‘static’ in that you set the pixels and you can turn off the power and the screen will still show what you wrote there.

This makes them poor for rapid updates however, and part of the push back for eReaders has been “Why would I read it on that if I can read it on my laptop/phone/crackberry?” and the answer is because it is comfortable reading something on a electrophoretic display/. The same can’t be said of an LCD, and worse there are things the LCD can do (color, animation) that means you need both. You might ask why do you have more than one kind of chair in your house. And because you need both the market position available for eReaders is “secondary device.”

That leads to the second problem, price. The opportunity cost for a second device which is a more comfortable read can only support modest a acquistion cost. So if you have an eReader for $700 (which the large format ones are) vs a laptop, and you have less than $1000 to spend, you get the laptop. If your budget for this stuff is $1500 you probably get a nicer laptop and that leaves you something less than $500 for the other features. So in all fairness a reader that was $75 would be selling like hotcakes today (there is plenty of value in carrying around stuff in one package to justify that) at $200 its a bit iffier since not only do you want to justify that expense vs a nicer phone or may be a digicam, against value, and against loss. And that brings us to the third, and perhaps stickliest problem, rights.

The state of copyright is completely messed up at the moment, in a large part because the infrastructure between the producer (writer/musician/etc) and the consumer has lost its value thanks to the Internet (any artist can distribute a million copies of their hit single for less than a weeks wages at In-n-Out Burger using an ISP hosting service, and they don’t need a ‘label’ to publicize it either) but since the money in “the business” has traditionally collected in the middle, the middle isn’t going without a fight and they have a dwindling pile of money to keep them afloat.

So a company like Random House or any other publisher has a hard time justifying to the writer why they are keeping 80-90% of the money paid for an ‘e’ edition when they aren’t spending a whole lot to print and distribute it.

The killer app for now is newspapers who are, in fact, dying. Over 50% of the ‘costs’ in a newspaper according to folks at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is ‘production/distribution’ costs, all the printers, the inks, the paper, the delivery truck drivers, and the unions of the people who run all those things. So there is an opportunity for something like the Boston Globe (nearly defunct) to give every one of their subscribers an eReader and distribute their paper over the airwaves. Not only does it cut their costs in half, and lower their carbon footprint (not only are their no delivery vans on the road there are more CO2 trees still standing), if they collect some modest demographics of the people they give the readers too they are in a position to provide much more targeted advertising. Coupons? Did you know you can scan a bar code off an electrophoretic display at a standard checkout counter? It completely overturns the business model of existing papers but its either that or die and of the two most people prefer to stay in business.

At this point, eReaders will happen, the question is who is going to win the lottery of being the defacto standard.

–Chuck

If I’m going to use a device as an e-book reader, it needs to be instant on — after all, I don’t have to wait for my books to boot.

Proprietary standards and DRM could end up really limiting the ebook market.

I’m very curious about the ebook trend. It seems that there will be a big nice market for ~9″ multitouch slates…when they get down to ~$250. This is about the price point for “disposable technology”. While the Kindle is a nice first attempt, it still lacks what Bill Joy calls the “It Works Feature”. It only shows text, and not great text.

Ebooks never took off on Notebook Computers for three reasons.
1. Resolution and Dynamic Range.
For extended reading, we want a really good black and crisp text.

Traditional displays simply don’t provide this experience unless the white point is searingly bright, causing the iris to constrict. The physiological impact of this is similar to shining a flashlight in your eye…the surrounding environment gets darker.

2. Tangible Reference.
We want to be able to hold and tilt a book as we adjust our bodies while reading for an extended period of time. This makes our bodies more comfortable and allow the eye to focus at its preferred “resting point” (somwhere between 30-35″ depending on the person).

Notebook computers it is difficult to achieve any of these things with a notebook computer.

3. Battery Power
The Kindle is pretty incredible…it can stay on for weeks at a time.

Try doing that with a backlit LCD. The next major step forward for e-ink like technologies will be moving images…this is when things will start to get Star Trek…but moving images require processing power and material state changes…these suck energy.

The net net: Ebooks may do well in specialized niches like education and business travel, but I’ll wait to toss my bookshelf thank you very much. When I get video with my morning epaper, maybe. Until then, ebooks will merely mimic an incumbent technology. It’s unclear who wants to pay to fund that format war.