markknight said:
In other words, it wont last. What do you think?
Color is such a popular feature that it renders black and white an expensive low-volume niche item. It happened with photographic film and developing. It happened with computer monitors. It happened with television.
Go to a developing country and look for the simplest, cheapest cell phone you can buy. Color screen. Does color make the phone better? Not that I can see, but people like color.
As for books still being black and white, yes they are on the text pages. But the photo sections in most paper immersive reading non-fiction books -- at least ones I read -- are now in color.
Ann in Arlington said:
For someone who just wants to read. . . a basic b&w ereader is all they need.
This is true.
Of course, there are lots of consumer products where it gets to the point where you can't purchase an item with just the features you need. For my needs, every new car sold in the US is, I think, over-powered. And even the simplest cell phone has a slew of features I don't need, ranging from games to color.
But if I was at Amazon looking at sales figures, and saw how sales of immersive reading non-fiction is still mostly going to my brick and mortar competition (
documented here), I would want to get as many people as possible over to a color platform. So they will, I predict, eventually stop making eInk readers.
Hopefully it will continue to be possible to buy repair parts, and load new books, on old eInk readers. But I'm not counting on it.