ALA TechSource has a brief blogger forum post on the state of E-Book Readers. The quote that I think is most worth thinking about comes from Jason Griffey:
E-books are the future of reading in a very real way, simply because at some point they will be too cheap to not use. One of my staff brought a receipt to me this week for a laptop that the library bought in 2000. It was $3600. I just priced netbooks for my library, and can get a machine that is ridiculously more powerful than the year-2000 laptop for under $350. The Kindle, and most other e-readers, are hovering around the $350 or so dollar mark right now. In ten years, what will they cost? How can paper continue to compete with Moore’s Law?
Not only does it make sense, for reasons of legality (terms of use) and usability, to wait before purchasing and implementing E-Readers in a library, but it also makes sense from a monetary standpoint. Amazon’s Kindle is king of the hill right now, but I think the big one is yet to arrive. Watch for it, however: when the convergence of price, usability, and usefulness happens, you want to be ready.
agreed — the big one is not here yet. But what do you think the magic price point will be? $199? $150?
The magic price point depends… the right reader, with the right selection of affordable e-books, at the right price, will sell faster than it can be made.
It may not even be a dedicated e-reader; a web-browsing, e-mail, basic media player (sound, images and video), e-reader touch screen tablet that has an open eye towards standards (but can also handle some DRM, which unfortunately isn’t going away yet) would sell like crazy if people realized that it would give them much of their media experience.
There are rumors about Apple getting into the netbook area; I wonder if they might be developing something like this instead… though it would be more expensive than I would expect, and would likely not be as inter-operable as I would like. This is based on the i-pod and i-phone pricing and operability.