Don’t Write Off Ereaders Just Yet
Posted by By Michael Bhaskar on 10 March, 2009 – 4:36 pm
Posted in Reading devices

This picture, taken at the R&D labs of the New York Times (featured on the TOC blog), seems to be saying that far from reading devices going away, they are now on an unstoppable trajectory: investment, diversification, rapid innovation, everything is there.

Yet in many ways, other than the blip that was the Kindle 2.0 launch, 2009 has conspicuously not been about the device. Think of Amazon’s recent announcement of an iPhone app; the meteoric rise of Stanza, unbowed by the Amazon play; the emergence of GoSpoken as reading software in there with the carriers and a range of smartphones. Think of the solid sales of the Nintendo DS reading package. This has been a year when buzzwords like mobile and twitter have taken on all comers and seen them left in the graveyard of 2008, not even worthy of a # tag.
New displays, new ways of reading. E-ink seems a remnant of a digital past as much as the future.
However I think we shouldn’t take our eyes off the reading device, and that this will still be a major, if not the only, focus of digital reading.
Why?
Because reading experiences on readers are very good and replicating that on other formats is extremely difficult. As the NYT pictures shows, this is a very healthy space.

To read the full story from the digital team at Pan Macmillan link here.