E-ink is not an accident
It's *critical* to getting the kind of long battery life people have started to *expect*.
Yes I get you can do an Android running LCD screen thingy for c£200, which is what $300-350?
So what. It's a lite netbook or PMP, and probably has battery life like a lite netbook or PMP. Why would I pay a *premium* for that when I can already get something very similar.
As volume ramps up and these too (and hopefully others) start to seriously compete we might see them at a reasonable price.
Let's be honest. They are currently bookstores who sell a reader. Perhaps it's time for them to start looking at the mobile phone model or the games console model. A portal device (possibly supplied at below cost) they supply to encourage people to buy *more* books at prices people think are *reasonable*. What is a novel in data terms? <100MB? 10c of disk storage? Dead tree prices for something that's *never* been near a tree, dead or otherwise.
BTW if someone were *really* serious about running with this some heavy investment in translation support (I doubt machine translation is anywhere near yet but machine *assisted* translation could keep the roll out time short. Once set up it could keep a translation team permanently employed). It's likely that it would not *all* be from English either. There appear to be a number of Russian rocket engineering textbooks which are substantially more up to date than the leading US introductory textbook, which if anything seems to have regressed in what it teachers
<rant>
(An engineering text book with *no* software included, pump performance specs for the V2 and a tone which can be summed up as "Rocket engineering is *hard*. We can't teach it too you in a textbook. Hire a company to do it for you, OK?")
</rant>
1 book. 1 launch. $1. 200 languages from day 1.