Here is a snippet from a blog post in Bibliofuture.
In 2000 Microsoft put out a timeline predicting what would happen the next 20 years with ebooks.
The prediction for 2010 was: Popular eBook devices weigh eight ounces, run for more than 24 hours, offer beautiful non-backlit displays, are available in flexible/foldable form factors, and hold more books and magazines than most university libraries. They cost less than $100 and are often given away free with the purchase of several books or a magazine subscription.
The Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces and cost $139 for the cheapest model. Microsoft was in the ballpark of being correct.
The rest of the predictions can be found on the site here. Pity that Microsoft didn’t predict that it would completely mess up its own entry into the ebook space.
They’re in the ballpark if you use weight and battery life as yardstick. Storage capacity is a horse of a different stripe – boy, were they ever *way* off on that one !
Alain – I wouldn’t say that. My Sony PRS-505 (which at this point is several years old) supports up to 64 GB of storage through two memory card slots. That should be enough for a couple of hundred thousand books at least.
If you take newer wireless models and add cloud storage support, the potential storage becomes essentially infinite.
Sigh. I was (and still am) a fan of MS Reader. That being said, I just converted some older titles from .lit to .mobi so I could load them on my K3. They managed to turn an industry-leading technology into a boat-anchor, just by doing nothing. Go Microsoft.
Regards,
Jack Tingle