“The paper book is dead,” says the digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte.
So what’s next for these digital book replacements? Will the e-reader be reduced to a tiny chip that can be implanted in our retina by 2015? Not quite, but those who think a lot about the future say e-readers are set to take on new shapes and sizes, and their prices will continue to fall.
Mr. Negroponte runs a nonprofit group that hopes to put inexpensive computers in the hands of millions of impoverished children around the globe. Its efforts helped push the commercial development of the popular netbook, the cheap small laptop computers that have grown in popularity in the last few years. He agreed that the price of e-readers eventually will fall to $50 and perhaps even $20.
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Evan Schnittman, a vice president of Oxford University Press, said “the real question isn’t about e-reader devices in five years, or even their price, as much as it’s about e-reading platforms” — the operating systems and bookstores that will power those devices.
Mr. Schnittman pointed to Amazon, which evolved from just building digital e-readers to launching an iPhone application and, then, developing applications that allow Amazon customers to read their Kindle books “on Blackberry’s, Macs, PC’s and, theoretically the category killer device, the iPad.”
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