Why are E-Readers so expensive? Why haven't the Chinese

>>59700674
very low demand, probly cause very low refresh rate. Also just expensive screens to make.

>>59700691
yeah but the chinese companies can make $800 phones with the same specs at $250.

Why can't they make a $200 e-reader at $50?

File: Remarkable-Paper-Tablet-Drawing-Pen-Sketch-Image.jpg (59KB, 800x445px) Image search: [Google]

59KB, 800x445px

I just want something like pic related.
>10.3"
>228 DPI
>digitizer with 2048 pressure levels
>pen with tilt detection
But why the fuck would they price it at ~$700?
Do they intentionally want to look themselves?

>>59700889
s/look/kill/g

>>59700691
I don't know about your country, but here in the Balkans people are starting to read more and more in the past few years, and libraries and book stores are getting more and more full.
I'd say a few more places around the world are
also going the Island way of reading more and more. So demand is indeed there and increasing.

>>59700674
Because Apple or Microsoft or some major company has not entered the segment in a flashy way, and forced competitive pricing.

Sony is the only big company with one of the best e-readers, and that's why they price it 800 fucking bucks.

>>59700976
What about Xiaomi

>>59700976
In the blakans? Which country?

>>59701066
Serbia.
Allow me to dispel the question you will ask in advance so we can stay on topic:
Yes i enjoy genociding Muslims, raping Croat women, and converting Albanian babies into coal in coal factories.

File: 027c91e67b91b86e513977331a0215d9.jpg (31KB, 1014x396px) Image search: [Google]

31KB, 1014x396px

>>59700674
>What's your dream E-Reader?

The Sony Digital Paper, only with a built in light like the current kindle paperwhite and maybe the software features of both the kindle and the SDP.

http://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-systems/t/digital-paper-notepad

>>59701084
Hello Serbro.

>>59700757
There are already $50 Kindles.

>>59701510
kindles are crap without microsd and closed source

>>59701544
It's an e-reader dummy. Who gives a fuck.

>>59701558
I awnt to read manga too and kindle doesn't have a microsd

>>59701544
who gives a shit whether your e-reader is open source

It's a book for fucks sake, how bankrupt does your existence have to be to criticize DRM on a fucking book?

>>59701544
How open do you want it? AFAIK Kobo's run on Linux and have a micro SD slot. Of course firmware and certain applications are still closed source...

>>59701584
>You buy a book
>Can't freely give/lend it to someone else
It's not hard anon. DRM sucks from a consumer's point of view.

>>59701584
>Having DRM on your books.
Whats next? DRM on my thoughts? Lending, sharing and copying are just things that you do with books, prohibiting me from doing that means selling an infierior product, mostly at an identical price. There are drm-free ebooks and you should bis them to get the most out of them.

>>59701643
>>59701584
as open as kobo

Economies of scale

If you sell a million tablets at a profit of, say, $10 per unit, and Im pulling numbers out of my ass, but the total, end profit margins on most electronics are very low, like 5% or less, you're making $10 million profit. A lot of which is going to go to R&D for future profits.

Since people dont want e-readers as much as tablets, they have to sell them for more money to get the same total profits, which are basically demanded by their board of directors/shareholders if they're a publicly traded IPO. Also e-ink screens or whatever they're called are more expensive to produce than LCD screens.

>>59700674

Capitalism.

are you fucking retarded? you can still read mobi ebooks on Kindle. I've never payed for an ebook

>>59701884
no mirosd card

File: ereaderunit_091702_1.jpg (44KB, 400x289px) Image search: [Google]

44KB, 400x289px

>>59700674
I already have my dream e-reader.

>>59702025
But there's more than enough space for books.

>>59701584
Um, because they don't support .txt format I had a nightmare of 3 weeks trying to figure out what in the fuck was wrong with the formatting of what I wanted to read. see, I downloaded stories and shit online I wanted to read not on a screen, but formatting the ebooks were a nightmare, getting them to work right was a fucking nightmare, oh what's this, I think it was ~ was a character that could not be used, I saw this in no documentation, and it caused hard crashes, all because they wanted to lock the fucking thing out of everyone else's bookstore.

>>59702082
Not for manga

>>59701142
>>59700674
that sony digital paper
a color ebook display
and a pen to draw with, possibly a high refresh mode that would do a shit job rendering the color on initial stroke just for the sake of being faster, but a refresh button that would redraw the whole page like it was meant to be seen.

>>59700674
>Writing on a e-ink display with that refresh time
That's why I love S-pen. Fuck this meme technology

>>59700889

Just 429 to pre-order it... You're not poor, are you?

>>59700674
e-readers are a niche product, very few people reads.

Also e-readers already work very well, it's hard to justify upgrading an e-reader when a 4 yo one already looks like paper as 1 month battery life. Hard to innovate.

I still use my Kindle 3
looooove it

Kindles are cheap and just fine

i read novels on a kindle paperwhite all the time

zomg so expensive $119

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BFIBRIE/ref=asc_df_B01BFIBRIE4920765/?tag=hyprod-20&creative=394997&creativeASIN=B01BFIBRIE&linkCode=df0&hvadid=167141672569&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5703109987344584020&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9012557&hvtargid=pla-273431748374

it's actually pretty easy to share books on a kindle, i share books with my mother and brother all the time

>mom has a book she thinks i'd like
>logs into her amazon account on my kindle
>i look through and download any of her stuff i want
>log back into my account, all new books are there

>>59701574
Manga sucks on e-ink.

>>59702884
>e-readers are a niche product, very few people reads.
E-readers are huge and books are a massive business. More people read for fun now than ever before.

>>59701746
>If you sell a million tablets at a profit of, say, $10 per unit, and Im pulling numbers out of my ass, but the total, end profit margins on most electronics are very low, like 5% or less, you're making $10 million profit. A lot of which is going to go to R&D for future profits.
E-readers don't make money on hardware. They are vehicles for Amazon to sell books.

Daily reminder that only plebbitors and numales pay (((amazon))) for their books

>>59700674
well i used to have kobo glo, but screen died. then i subscribed to my local libriary and never looked back.

also reading novels is essential for IT related personel. it keeps you sane.

>>59703614
No it doesn't, you just need a big, high dpi screen like the kobo's.

>>59700674
Wait for the patents on the screen technology to expire and then the chinks will mass produce them

>I want to buy an A4 e-reader so I don't have to expend shit tons of money in ink stained cellulose any more
>find >>59701142
>$1000
>Sony doesn't even sell it any more

Fucking shit.

>>59705497
>implying chinks give a fuck about patents

>>59705548
They do if they want their products to be sold in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, any place that has a patent agreement.

real books will probably die in your lifetime

feels bad man, I hate e readers

>>59700757
Something about eink patents

>>59701643
>You buy a book
>Can't freely give/lend it to someone else
They buy a fucking physical book. These don't allow you to make an arbitrary number of digital copies to "lend" it.

OP is a poorfag and a freetard. Nothing to see here.

>>59705708
Actually most people prefer physical books. They're not going anywhere. I prefer digital because it's more convenient for me to carry all my library in a small device, but I understand why most people want paper books.

>>59706321
Carrying around a stack of books is inconvenient.

Limiting the ability to copy will never stop pirates. It mostly just hurts honest customers.

Why are there no E-Readers that don't try to spy on me?

>>59705489
all current Kobos are too small.
you would need the same size as an actual manga.

even if you got like a Kindle DX, E inks slow refresh rate will make page-turning a shitty experience.
mangas need a full refresh for every page as they are full of pixels or otherwise you would see noticeable ghosting

Just wait until 2020 for the color eink displays.

>>59700889
>not using a feather to put ink on dead trees

>>59705489
I have a Kobo Aura HD which I bought for manga. It doesn't work. You need a 10 inch+ screen and faster than 2 seconds per page refresh time.

>>59700889
what's the refresh rate like?

>>59708622
...but there are?

just buy any model that has no internet connectivity, hard to spy without it

>>59705965
Finally someone gets it. It's proprietary, there's basically only one company that makes it and one company that buys it.

File: Samsung-copied-Apple-iPod-touch.jpg (82KB, 580x819px) Image search: [Google]

82KB, 580x819px

>>59705965
>>59709265
since when did chinks starting caring about patents?

>>59709319
Idiot. Copying a design can be done by a trained monkey but if you don't know how to make the hardware, you just can't.

>>59701584
I bought a kindle paperwhite. It's nice, but the OS is dogshit. All the things you'd think would be basic are intentionally locked down by Amazon. I can't even change my fucking fonts or screensaver.

So I jailbroke it and got it to do what it should've done out of the box. For how much it cost, that is absolutely unacceptable.

I'd never buy another kindle.

>>59700757
Because it's basically the same fucking phones just with a different logo slapped on them. E-readers are completely different, much more expensive technology.

>>59709174
>You need a 10 inch+ screen

kobo aura h2o has a slightly larger screen (6.8") but you won't really find 10" eink devices, I agree with this complaint though, having wanted a larger eink device for reading for a while

>and faster than 2 seconds per page refresh time.

while I don't use the device for manga, this is something you're really going to have to experiment and benchmark on if you want a fast experience, I was able to go from 1-2 second page refreshes on books in mobi format to near enough instant page refreshes in kepub format (kobo's epub format) and to about <100-200ms with a full page refresh enabled

don't get me wrong it's still going to be slow for manga and pictures but you can probably get some decent speed if you tweak some stuff in calibre or something, it should be possible to get faster speed than whatever the stock format for your manga is, eink displays are slow but ereaders are really gimped on processor speed and memory to get ridiculous battery life - changing the chapter limits in books gives a noticeable speed boost so compressing or reducing the size of manga pages should give a similar speed boost too

>>59700976
Ereaders are high demand here esp w/grad students and professors who have to read countless research papers in pdf format everyday.

They all have that extremely expensive sony one where you can do annotations.

I would like something to read libgen.io and sci-hub books and academic journal articles but they're all highly proprietary full of DRM aids so I just print these in the morning at Habeeb's convenience store and read them the old fashion way

>>59701084
BASED SRB

File: Sony-DPT-S2.jpg (68KB, 480x519px) Image search: [Google]

68KB, 480x519px

>>59700889

SONY

Those are e-paper, not meant to watch video but read and draw.

>>59709477
the other alternative to traditional paper and e-readers are tablets.
cheapest iPad is now $329.

>>59700674
>Why are E-Readers so expensive?
Tablets won't be commodity cheap for another decade or two. Actual e-readers have been cheap for ages, but the market for them is tiny. These things don't function without a DRM platform backing them and publishers have no intention of making their ebooks easy to copy or distribute. PDF support is intentionally poor on these things.

>Why haven't the Chinese made cheap E-Reader yet?
They've tried. Ever use a bottom end Android tablet? They're awful.

If you're looking to be your typical college brodude that spends a little on hardware and pirates everything else, you're out of luck here.

>>59710282
>but the market for them is tiny.
>http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385264,00.asp
5 billion dollar business for Amazon in 2015

>>59710381
>posts about the market for e-readers
>counters with argument about the market for ebooks
Have a (you)

>>59700674
My dream E-reader
>6" screen
>backlit
>next/previous page buttons
>1ms latency on pageturns
>waterproof
would be fucking amazing

>>59710550
also those numbers aren't from Amazon but some "analyst"

>>59710550
Also just for comparison, tablet market which is pretty small itself is 99 billions.

>>59710561
>>backlit
who wants that shit?
will basically forfeit any benefit of e-ink and cause eye straining.

front-lightning is superior and available since 2012:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/26/technology/light-reading.html?_r=0

>>59710606
>>59710615
that NYT article from 2012 has some actual numbers:
>In the United States, manufacturers sold nine million e-book readers this year, down from 15.5 million last year, according to Forrester Research.
so let's assume an average selling price of $100 and it's a $900 million market in the US

>>59710664
>15.5 million Americans read
Sounds like fake news.

>>59710615
Whatever tech the paperwhite has, then. I just called it 'backlighting' because that's the first term that came to mind. Been using a kindle paperwhite for 5 years and never once experienced eye-strain at night while using.

>>59701884
This
>>59702025
What the fuck man.
>plug into computer
>dragon drop
Yes, that easy. Sometimes conversion first but most generally work.

>>59708571
>Limiting the ability to copy will never stop pirates.
Actually they do.

>>59710706
sounds like fake math.
15.5 million in 2011 and 9 million in 2012 devices sold will only translate to 15.5 million readers if none were sold before 2011 and all those buyers in 2012 were upgrading.

>>59710857
Definitely sounds like overanalyzing an offhanded comment.

>>59710880
>third-grade math
>overanalyzing

>>59700674
e-ink patents problems.
When do they expire?

>>59710803
Actually it doesn't. All currently available ebook DRM is trivially defeated.

>>59700674
I just got two for $5 each in nearly-unused condition. Nice Sony ones. The one is touch screen, this hurts the screen a bit. I am going to get another one of the non-touch screen ones instead.

The new Sony one is amazing though.

>>59709609
You can buy these now, $1000 or so for the 8x10 inch one.

File: kindle-keyboard-11.jpg (26KB, 600x442px) Image search: [Google]

26KB, 600x442px

>>59700674
>What's your dream E-Reader?
Kindle keyboard with 30Hz refresh rate, a CPU powerful enough to handle a WM, and a trackball

>>59700674
>What's your dream E-Reader?
The Yotaphone 2 is pretty much that, shits convenient and comfy as.
t. phone-posting from the E-ink screen on my yotaphone 2

>>59702083
Calibre

>>59710282
>These things don't function without a DRM platform backing them and publishers have no intention of making their ebooks easy to copy or distribute.
even for kindle you literally just drag and drop the mobi onto the device, and if you can't find the book in mobi format then it takes 2 seconds to convert it.

I just bought a sub $150 Chinese tablet instead. I got too tired of waiting for the tech to catch up. I'd pay more for the same tablet but with an e ink screen, but honestly a normal screen is completely fine for reading. Its a talk 9x if anyone is wondering