The marriage of an American technology firm and a Taiwanese display panel manufacturer has helped make digital reading a prospective challenger to paper as the main medium for transmitting printed information.
Four years ago Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink Corporation and Taiwan’s Prime View International Co. hooked up to create an e-paper display that now supplies 90 percent of the fast-growing e-reader market.
Taiwanese involvement has led some observers to compare e-reading to the Chinese technological revolution 2,000 years ago, when newly invented paper replaced the bulky wooden blocks and bamboo slats on which Chinese characters were written.
But questions still hang over the Taiwanese-American venture, including the readiness of the marketplace to dispense with paper-based reading, in favor of relatively unfamiliar e-readers.
“It’s cockamamie to think a product like that is going to revolutionize the way most people read,” analyst Michael Norris of Rockville, Maryland research firm Simba Information Co. said in an e-mail. Americans use e-books at a rate “much, much slower than it looks.”
Another challenge for the venture is the ability of key customers such as Amazon and Sony to withstand the onslaught of multifunctional computing devices that have e-reader capability, particularly Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc.’s iPad, whose five-month sales history has left their one-dimensional models struggling to keep up.
Researcher Chris Hung of Taiwan’s Institute for the Information Industry says iPad sales are expected to reach 9 million this year, a figure that took e-books two years to reach.
Competition among e-book readers is heating up. Last month, Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. cut the U.S. price of its smaller Kindle by $70, to $189, after Barnes & Noble reduced the price of its Nook e-reader by $60, to $199. The iPad starts at $499.
Still, the dedicated e-reader manufacturers appear to have a lot to be happy about — at least for now. Sales in…