Allen WeinerEvery time I read a blog post, like this one, reviewing the Kindle’s arrive in South Africa, I retreat to the notion that the future of ereading is on smartphones. Even with a slightly less optimal reading experience, the ubiquity of smartphones (not to mention carrier subsidized cost) is too glaring an advantage to ignore.
Category: Amazon Mobile Newspapers Publishing Tags: Amazon, ebooks, Kindle, Publishing, smartphones
2 responses so far ↓
1 Nick Jones November 16, 2009 at 7:29 pm
IMHO the real paradigm shift isn’t selling Kindle to the high-income South Africans who can afford it. I’d love to see someone to develop a low cost e-book reader for low-income South Africans (or low income people anywhere else for that matter). Smartphones don’t fix the problem because most are unaffordable by low income groups. Perhaps something more like OLPC could become the e-book for low income groups?
2 Will Hahn November 16, 2009 at 7:54 pm
It might be more like the Blackberry model: some kind of e-reader that compresses and simplifies the text to make it easy/cheap/fast to download, and maybe even works with just 2G. If we’re talking about South Africa, they will be sharply interested in using less bandwidth. And I imagine you’d have to sacrifice color, pictures, maps, etc. SO then you’d need someone who could “clean” e-books to make them slimmed down and suitable for the economy-class reader.