E-reading: Revolution in the making or fading fad?
[Via eSchool news]
Four years ago Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink Corporation and Taiwan’s Prime View International Co. hooked up to create an e-paper display that now supplies 90 percent of the fast growing eReader market, the Associated Press reports. But questions still hang over the Taiwanese-American venture, including the readiness of the marketplace to dispense with paper-based reading, in favor of relatively unfamiliar eReaders. “It’s cockamamie to think a product like that is going to revolutionize the way most people read,” analyst Michael Norris of Rockville, Maryland research firm Simba Information Co. said in an eMail. Americans use eBooks at a rate “much, much slower than it looks.” Another challenge for the venture is the ability of key customers like Amazon and Sony to withstand the onslaught of multifunctional computing devices which have eReader capability, particularly Apple’s iPad, whose five-month sales history has left their one-dimensional models struggling to keep up…
