Legal Commentary

2010 – the year of the tablet / e-book?

By David Canton

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.   It reads as follows:

2010 will see some interesting and useful developments in the tablet / e-book reader space.  The concept of a thin, light, portable device with a decent screen size (i.e. a letter sized piece of paper) and long battery life to read things on – such as newspapers, magazines, books, the web – is quite compelling.

There are a few products on the market already – such as the Kindle.  In my view the tipping point to widespread adoption will be colour screens that can render glossy magazine resolution, the ability to get web content via wifi rather than just over a cell network, and a low enough price point.  At least that’s what I’m holding out for.

To some extent this is vapourware -  but there is a lot of activity and potential competition in this space.  Consider:

Several Slaw articles have mentioned the Kindle and e-book readers like the Sony reader.

Another entrant announced within the last few days is the  JooJoo, formerly known as the  Crunchpad.  This one is rather controversial.   The  story behind it (feuding developers) is as interesting as the product itself.

Of course there is the much anticipated Apple tablet - which many predict will appear some time in 2010.

Microsoft has shown a concept called the Courier.

And top that off with a publishers consortium that is working on digital publishing standards.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on December 09, 2009 (boomark / email).