At $8.95 apiece, $1100 can buy you 122 mass-market paperbacks. I certainly hope that someone can bring that retail price down a fair chunk, or this tech is not going far.
This is not meant for reading paperbacks. A kindle paperwhite, at $120, is a far better choice for that.
This is for reading and annotating documents, and generally replacing paper in an office or academic setting. Given then number of research papers I've printed out (thousands and thousands of pages), I can see a huge use for this. It may still not be cost effective, but is still much more environmentally friendly and saves the hassle of keeping track of all of that paper.
The paperless office has been an idea for several decades, but without devices like this that allow easy reading and annotation, we haven't been able to get there.
For research papers... maybe 50 pages including technical graphics? With a monochrome laser printer, we'll give a very high estimate of $0.10 per page, or $5 per paper. That's still 220 papers to break even, at least, and only one person can use it at a time, unlike the printer, which can be shared for the whole office.
My home printer is over 10 years old, and I still don't think I have spent more than $800 on it during that time, including consumables.
And I would recommend the Kobo Glo/Aura over the Paperwhite for paperbacks. The MicroSD card slot alone is worth it.
> For research papers... maybe 50 pages including technical graphics? With a monochrome laser printer, we'll give a very high estimate of $0.10 per page, or $5 per paper. That's still 220 papers to break even
Okay, so, yes, its cheaper to print paper than to carry a letter-sized, write-on-it, ereader.
OTOH, its a lot more convenient to carry one ereader if you have a lot of stuff to view than it is to carry a stack of books/research papers/etc.
Fine, but you're leaving out the cost of the printer, too. And the shelves to put all the papers on, and the cost to dispose of (or recycle) them when you're done with them.
No need to be a wealthy law firm. $1100 for an obviously deductible business expense isn't much, about the same as a quality laptop (and far less than what people used to pay for a quality laptop). You'll see people using these on CSI or some other legal-themed network TV show before the end of the year, possibly even the end of this season. If I was a TV show producer I'd be on the phone to Sony right now begging for two of them - one for the TV lawyers to use on screen, and one for me to mark up scripts on.
> If I was a TV show producer I'd be on the phone to Sony right now begging for two of them - one for the TV lawyers to use on screen, and one for me to mark up scripts on.
Can we really call this new technology? I get it that it's a new iteration of eInk technology, but it doesn't seem that Sony is really taking advantage of any of the advances with this implementation. As much as I really want to get excited about this, I just don't see anything here that really does it for me.
As much as I think Amazon needs some competition, I'd love to see them take a swing at this concept with a Kindle - "Technical Edition". While I'd love to see some openness and extensibility via an SDK, I think if you get the price point right, it doesn't much matter. A sub $300 A4 or Letter sized device with the ability to read major document formats, annotate notes and maybe offer a digital note taking solution would be a dream.
But, at $1,100 this is nothing but a interesting but wholly irrelevant spectacle from a company that is rapidly trending in the same direction.
I'm in the market. At one point I tried a Logitech Io2, even though I knew it was too awkward to really work.
At this price point lifetime is what I'm looking for; a moleskine replacement that could last 6-10 years would be interesting to me, even if it isn't perfect (refresh rates, and so on). Of course data accessibility is a concern with Sony too.
