E-Reader goes on sale, about $600 too much
Engadget’s got the details on the first e-reader to go on sale in Europe this month.
…[iRex]’s threatened to come in first (and cheaper). Well, cheaper may no longer be the case, but it looks like the iRex is set to ship this month in Europe for a princely €649 ($820 US)…
As part of a business plan competition (wish I had the final plan, but it’s unavailable at the moment), a small group of us priced out what it would take to implement these in schools. We came up with a final price of approx. $150 (I believe) for the parts, warranty, etc. This included on the order of 20 actual pages you could flip, so that the look-and-feel was as close to a book as possible. Again, the market was not technophiles, but rather secondary and elementary school students, so durability was foremost. Even dealing with content licenses (provided by current publishing houses such as Houghton Mifflin and McGraw-Hill), this Digital Book would have still saved schools money. We like saving people money.
It’s important to note that this was a theoretical model, but it (in my opinion) was pretty thought out. We focused pretty extensively on having a lobbyist staff member capable of selling school districts on this, as well as the internal technology (battery life, digital paper, etc.) Even if we got the money needed (oh, it was only a few million dollars…) it’d take a good 3 years of hard-core development to come up with a prototype.
But hey, maybe if some people want to give us some capital, we’ll get to making a few.
Technorati Tags: e-reader, e-ink, technology, ebook
June 16th, 2006 at 11:46 am
woohoo! that was my favourite project this year
go team!
June 16th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Haha, it was excellent stuff indeed. I’m surprised you’ve already read this!