At $8.95 apiece, $1100 can buy you 122 mass-market paperbacks. I certainly hope that someone can bring that retail price down a fair chunk, or this tech is not going far.
This is for reading and annotating documents, and generally replacing paper in an office or academic setting. Given then number of research papers I've printed out (thousands and thousands of pages), I can see a huge use for this. It may still not be cost effective, but is still much more environmentally friendly and saves the hassle of keeping track of all of that paper.
The paperless office has been an idea for several decades, but without devices like this that allow easy reading and annotation, we haven't been able to get there.
This replaces your legal/letter notepad your drag meeting to meeting, not your Kindle.
Bones. I expect to see this on Bones shortly.
I've worked with Laptop or iPad/Keyboard and I can make it work, but nothing beats a pen and folio.
My home printer is over 10 years old, and I still don't think I have spent more than $800 on it during that time, including consumables.
And I would recommend the Kobo Glo/Aura over the Paperwhite for paperbacks. The MicroSD card slot alone is worth it.
Okay, so, yes, its cheaper to print paper than to carry a letter-sized, write-on-it, ereader.
OTOH, its a lot more convenient to carry one ereader if you have a lot of stuff to view than it is to carry a stack of books/research papers/etc.
As much as I think Amazon needs some competition, I'd love to see them take a swing at this concept with a Kindle - "Technical Edition". While I'd love to see some openness and extensibility via an SDK, I think if you get the price point right, it doesn't much matter. A sub $300 A4 or Letter sized device with the ability to read major document formats, annotate notes and maybe offer a digital note taking solution would be a dream.
But, at $1,100 this is nothing but a interesting but wholly irrelevant spectacle from a company that is rapidly trending in the same direction.
At this price point lifetime is what I'm looking for; a moleskine replacement that could last 6-10 years would be interesting to me, even if it isn't perfect (refresh rates, and so on). Of course data accessibility is a concern with Sony too.
Yeah, but you can't get a letter-sized eink reader for around $40.