It might not be as good an ebook reader as a dedicated one, but an iPhone isn't as good a phone as a dedicated phone either. But when a consumer decides whether or not to drop several hundred dollars on a purchase, it's easier to justify a device that meets 75% of their ebook reading needs and is also a movie/music player, gaming platform, word processor, web browser, and has thousands of cool apps to choose from, than one that meets 90% of their ebook reader needs, and does nothing else.
Color e-ink might be great for ebooks as they exist today. But since the technology is great for static content and fails at motion content, it's not going to scale well as ebooks mature. If you look at the Sports Illustrated tablet demo, you'll see how static and video are likely to begin blending into multimedia ebooks.
Ebooks are currently where movies where when the technology first started, which is to say stage productions that just happen to be filmed - a literal porting of the old medium into the new one. The coming decade will likely see a lot of innovation toward figuring out what ebooks can be *without* necessarily sticking to the constraints of a physical book. And, as much as I like the idea of color e-ink, it does have a lot of the same limitations.
To extend the metaphor, netbooks are also a lot like filmed stage plays. They fill the gap between cell phone and laptop by just being a smaller, wimpier version of a laptop. It can still do a lot of what a laptop can, but it's cramped, awkward, and often a terrible user experience (since the people designing the software/sites didn't have that form factor in mind when they made it). Tablets take a different approach, giving you a much better UI to accomplish 80% of what you really want to do on the go anyhow, and having a custom built, form-factor-appropriate UI for each piece of software.
Personally, I think this is the right approach. Not necessarily because I love the tablet format. It has a ways to go before it'll be ubiquitous. But because people will know what they're getting, and will have a much better experience with it. Most of the people buying netbooks just think they're inexpensive laptops, and don't realize how underpowered they are until it's too late. With a tablet, at least they'll know it's a secondary device they're buying, not a primary.
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Color e-ink might be great for ebooks as they exist today. But since the technology is great for static content and fails at motion content, it's not going to scale well as ebooks mature. If you look at the Sports Illustrated tablet demo, you'll see how static and video are likely to begin blending into multimedia ebooks.
Ebooks are currently where movies where when the technology first started, which is to say stage productions that just happen to be filmed - a literal porting of the old medium into the new one. The coming decade will likely see a lot of innovation toward figuring out what ebooks can be *without* necessarily sticking to the constraints of a physical book. And, as much as I like the idea of color e-ink, it does have a lot of the same limitations.
To extend the metaphor, netbooks are also a lot like filmed stage plays. They fill the gap between cell phone and laptop by just being a smaller, wimpier version of a laptop. It can still do a lot of what a laptop can, but it's cramped, awkward, and often a terrible user experience (since the people designing the software/sites didn't have that form factor in mind when they made it). Tablets take a different approach, giving you a much better UI to accomplish 80% of what you really want to do on the go anyhow, and having a custom built, form-factor-appropriate UI for each piece of software.
Personally, I think this is the right approach. Not necessarily because I love the tablet format. It has a ways to go before it'll be ubiquitous. But because people will know what they're getting, and will have a much better experience with it. Most of the people buying netbooks just think they're inexpensive laptops, and don't realize how underpowered they are until it's too late. With a tablet, at least they'll know it's a secondary device they're buying, not a primary.