4 ms·

The problem is that Amazon has a virtual monopoly on the e-reader market. If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in the US

The problem is that Amazon has a virtual monopoly on the e-reader market. If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in the US. With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy whatever good enough technology Amazon sells. There might very well be a high end screen tech that people would pay for, much as how Apple discovered people are willing to pay for higher resolution LCDs on their laptops and smartphones But without hardware diversity in the e-reader market, that higher price point may never be found, and as such many promising technologies will never have a chance to be further developed and come down in price.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
This might be an anecdote, but I am an avid consumer of e-reader-like products, and me not having bought (even though having had researched thoroughly) any pixel QI products has nothing to do with Kindle. I have bought 8 e-readers during the years and none of them were Kindle. In this year it is so easy to do research about any available products, and order any available products, that it is hard to compete only by brand name. You talk about price point, but Notion Ink was not even that expensive. If you compare it to other options at the time there was some small premium for the new screen, but it didn't even register for me as a factor when choosing what to buy. The problem as I see it is: 1) Pixel QI has worse parameters (brightness/contrast levels) in the e-ink mode. The existing screens already have problems with brightness. They don't really look like good ink on good paper, the contrast is lower. This one looked (at least in all the marketing materials) like it has even lower brightness, it would be even harder to read from it. This might have been a quirk of bad marketing? Sure, I don't really care. If they can't show me why the screen would be better, how do they expect me to buy it? If you buy an e-reader, you want the e-ink mode to be superior, not the other way around. That's the reason you buy the device, for e-ink mode. Pixel QI wanted me to buy an e-ink screen, but sacrificing e-ink experience... 1.2) As a consequence of the screen technology, any Pixel QI device would have a much worse battery time than an e-ink, so that's another advantage of an e-reader gone. 2) There is really no need/ no use cases (for the average consumer, but since we are taking big markets, that's what matters) - for the screen that can do both modes, but does the e-reader mode poorly. Do you want to read in poor lighting conditions? There are alreay e-readers with backlit displays or just lamps... Which is better for the eyes anyway, it's not even that comfortable to read from a brightly lit screen in a dark room. 3) Existing e-ink screen can already be used with for example android and other apps. IT doesn't just have to be books. They are monochrome ofcourse, and you have to be a little finicky in certain apps, and you can't watch videos, but aside from that they are actually quite useful. This is the setup I have right now. I can read books, but also use most other static-screen apps like calendar, browser, audiobook etc. 4) (minor one) The original product with this screen (notion ink) went too heavily on new untested software (they made a completely different type of interface, with completely new workflows, which to me looked really questionable in terms of usability at all - and even if they would show up as being useful - I would not trust such a small company, which already undertakes a huge task of delivering the first Pixel QI product, to also simultaneously focus on creating a new type of interface, supporting it, polishing it, etc. It's not an easy task.) Android was already under way back then, I just wanted an android box! Basically they tried to position themselves as a "standard ereader killer" ("kindle killer"), but the most annoying feature of Kindle is its closed garden of apps and proprietary formats. And what would be the point of Notion Ink if it would be just another closed garden?
- lsc 8y ago
  do you know of an e-ink device that runs a fairly standard and up-to-date (google play store compatible) version of android? such a thing would be pretty useful for me.
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    https://onyxboox.com/ https://onyxboox.com/ are making some very cool devices, I think most are running Android. It might not be updated by the manufacturer every 6 months (not even many phones do that), but it definitely runs most of the latest apps.
    - eichin 8y ago
      The particularly cool bit: at least the Boox Max 2 has HDMI input so I can pop it up on my thinkpad as an external monitor (kind of clumsy, needs power too, but I've run emacs on it Just Fine...)
    - abawany 8y ago
      I recommend reading the Onyx forum on Mobileread (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=220 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=220) before making any decisions. In particular, the vendor that you buy from will make a big difference in your support experience - Booxtor's store (https://ereader.store/en/ https://ereader.store/en/) is a good place since they tend to release firmware updates proactively and work on the above forum to troubleshoot issues. Onyx is an interesting company. Their devices are amazing IMO (e.g. the Boox Max 2) but some of the issues that people encounter has tended to scare me a bit. I still hope to get a 13.3" Android-based e-reader some day.
lsc 8y ago
>If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in the US. For the people who don't buy their e-books from amazon, I think the market is quite competitive. I mean, if you are reading PDFs, unless you like really small type or spending a lot of effort converting, you are going to buy one of the myriad A4 sized e-readers from various vendors. Most of the gutenberg readers I know use an off-brand e-reader if they buy new. >With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy whatever good enough technology Amazon sells. I own a handful of high-end e-readers, many of which run android. How come none of those android devices, for instance, my A4 sized Sony e-reader, run the amazon app available in the play store? I suspect that it's mostly that the Sony, in spite of being a much better reader for PDFs than my oasis, is simply not a better device for reading books that are formatted for the kindle. (I'm not saying that there isn't a problem... I'm just saying that the monopoly is almost entirely in the convenience of the kindle book store. Agreements with publishers. And I am claiming that there is much competition for the (much smaller) market for e-readers for content outside the amazon kindle e-book ecosystem)
- com2kid 8y ago
  > For the people who don't buy their e-books from amazon, I think the market is quite competitive. And tiny. Amazon has by far the largest in the US market, from numbers I just googled and haven't verified, Amazon is 83% of ebook sales in the US, and probably and even larger % if your consider "ebooks read on a digital paper device". Hardware technologies cost hundreds of millions to develop, and years of active sales to refine and bring prices down. Amazon has a "good enough" tech in their Kindles, so the market is stagnating, outside of some cool stuff like Remarkable, which isn't a new display tech stack, nor are their sales numbers going to support development of new techs.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago

This might be an anecdote, but I am an avid consumer of e-reader-like products, and me not having bought (even though having had researched thoroughly) any pixel QI products has nothing to do with Kindle. I have bought 8 e-readers during the years and none of them were Kindle. In this year it is so easy to do research about any available products, and order any available products, that it is hard to compete only by brand name. You talk about price point, but Notion Ink was not even that expensive. If you compare it to other options at the time there was some small premium for the new screen, but it didn't even register for me as a factor when choosing what to buy. The problem as I see it is: 1) Pixel QI has worse parameters (brightness/contrast levels) in the e-ink mode. The existing screens already have problems with brightness. They don't really look like good ink on good paper, the contrast is lower. This one looked (at least in all the marketing materials) like it has even lower brightness, it would be even harder to read from it. This might have been a quirk of bad marketing? Sure, I don't really care. If they can't show me why the screen would be better, how do they expect me to buy it? If you buy an e-reader, you want the e-ink mode to be superior, not the other way around. That's the reason you buy the device, for e-ink mode. Pixel QI wanted me to buy an e-ink screen, but sacrificing e-ink experience... 1.2) As a consequence of the screen technology, any Pixel QI device would have a much worse battery time than an e-ink, so that's another advantage of an e-reader gone. 2) There is really no need/ no use cases (for the average consumer, but since we are taking big markets, that's what matters) - for the screen that can do both modes, but does the e-reader mode poorly. Do you want to read in poor lighting conditions? There are alreay e-readers with backlit displays or just lamps... Which is better for the eyes anyway, it's not even that comfortable to read from a brightly lit screen in a dark room. 3) Existing e-ink screen can already be used with for example android and other apps. IT doesn't just have to be books. They are monochrome ofcourse, and you have to be a little finicky in certain apps, and you can't watch videos, but aside from that they are actually quite useful. This is the setup I have right now. I can read books, but also use most other static-screen apps like calendar, browser, audiobook etc. 4) (minor one) The original product with this screen (notion ink) went too heavily on new untested software (they made a completely different type of interface, with completely new workflows, which to me looked really questionable in terms of usability at all - and even if they would show up as being useful - I would not trust such a small company, which already undertakes a huge task of delivering the first Pixel QI product, to also simultaneously focus on creating a new type of interface, supporting it, polishing it, etc. It's not an easy task.) Android was already under way back then, I just wanted an android box! Basically they tried to position themselves as a "standard ereader killer" ("kindle killer"), but the most annoying feature of Kindle is its closed garden of apps and proprietary formats. And what would be the point of Notion Ink if it would be just another closed garden?

lsc 8y ago
do you know of an e-ink device that runs a fairly standard and up-to-date (google play store compatible) version of android? such a thing would be pretty useful for me.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  https://onyxboox.com/ https://onyxboox.com/ are making some very cool devices, I think most are running Android. It might not be updated by the manufacturer every 6 months (not even many phones do that), but it definitely runs most of the latest apps.
  - eichin 8y ago
    The particularly cool bit: at least the Boox Max 2 has HDMI input so I can pop it up on my thinkpad as an external monitor (kind of clumsy, needs power too, but I've run emacs on it Just Fine...)
  - abawany 8y ago
    I recommend reading the Onyx forum on Mobileread (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=220 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=220) before making any decisions. In particular, the vendor that you buy from will make a big difference in your support experience - Booxtor's store (https://ereader.store/en/ https://ereader.store/en/) is a good place since they tend to release firmware updates proactively and work on the above forum to troubleshoot issues. Onyx is an interesting company. Their devices are amazing IMO (e.g. the Boox Max 2) but some of the issues that people encounter has tended to scare me a bit. I still hope to get a 13.3" Android-based e-reader some day.

lsc 8y ago

>If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in the US. For the people who don't buy their e-books from amazon, I think the market is quite competitive. I mean, if you are reading PDFs, unless you like really small type or spending a lot of effort converting, you are going to buy one of the myriad A4 sized e-readers from various vendors. Most of the gutenberg readers I know use an off-brand e-reader if they buy new. >With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy whatever good enough technology Amazon sells. I own a handful of high-end e-readers, many of which run android. How come none of those android devices, for instance, my A4 sized Sony e-reader, run the amazon app available in the play store? I suspect that it's mostly that the Sony, in spite of being a much better reader for PDFs than my oasis, is simply not a better device for reading books that are formatted for the kindle. (I'm not saying that there isn't a problem... I'm just saying that the monopoly is almost entirely in the convenience of the kindle book store. Agreements with publishers. And I am claiming that there is much competition for the (much smaller) market for e-readers for content outside the amazon kindle e-book ecosystem)

com2kid 8y ago
> For the people who don't buy their e-books from amazon, I think the market is quite competitive. And tiny. Amazon has by far the largest in the US market, from numbers I just googled and haven't verified, Amazon is 83% of ebook sales in the US, and probably and even larger % if your consider "ebooks read on a digital paper device". Hardware technologies cost hundreds of millions to develop, and years of active sales to refine and bring prices down. Amazon has a "good enough" tech in their Kindles, so the market is stagnating, outside of some cool stuff like Remarkable, which isn't a new display tech stack, nor are their sales numbers going to support development of new techs.