Best Tablet Review has a great article giving their winners and losers take on the show. A lot of ebook stuff is included. You can find it here, and it’s worth reading. Just a couple for you:
Winners: Color screens for ereaders. Norton Ink and Pixel Qi. Losers: Plastic Logic Que. Everything E Ink. Breaking even: Skiff e-reader.
I’m baffled by all the kudos and desire for color screen ereaders. Unless you read magazines or picture books, there is all most no need for color in a book, aside from the cover, and that is a mere trifle not worth extra expense or battery drain.
I really like the flexibility of the Skiff e-reader – I’d put that as a tentative winner.
@Greg M.:
I have to disagree on that: this incoming breed of color e-readers, though seemingly limited in color gamut, is good enough for the casual, if not usual, infographics/map/infoviz seen on some academic journals/books, newspapers and encyclopedias. One fine day we’ll find ourselves sorrounded by full-color, fully reflective info surfaces.
Color screens for books do have a use. Besides magazines, there are also various text books that can make use of color. Without color, medical references with charts and diagrams would be much harder to work with.
Long term, display directly into the eyeball, allowing heads-up display, continual real-time connectivity and virtual worlds that are virtually real.
In the short term, it’s a cost game. We didn’t really need color monitors or color laser printers but when the cost got down to a small percentage increase over black and white, we figured why not. If color readers are 10-15% premium, they’ll get a lot of takers. At 100%, not-so-much is my guess.
Rob Preece
Publisher