Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) will initiate a five-year, $65-million project to stimulate development of digital publication industries in Taiwan, Bryan Chuang and Adam Hwang reported in Digitimes yesterday. MOEA said its goal is for Taiwan-made eBook readers (EBRs) to command 80% of the global market, with sales of NT$50 billion (US$1.54 billion) in 2013.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Considering that Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry currently supplies the Kindle EBR to Amazon, and expects to make 50 million EBRs for China Telecom, MOEA’s project amounts to helping Taiwan hold on to its current market share while the industry undergoes dramatic growth.

But MOEA isn’t stopping there. As part of the same project, it also intends to encourage the development of two or three trading platforms for Chinese-language e-books, more than 10 new applications for the e-book platform, and the publication of 100,000 Chinese-language e-books. Overall, MOEA is shooting for a cumulative total investment of NT$10 billion by publishers and an e-book customer base of one million avid e-readers.

The shared focus on eBooks for eBook readers isn’t surprising, nor is the development of media delivery mechanisms. But why the interest in new applications for EBRs? Well, as I never tire of saying, one of the most interesting things to look for in this space is the development of products that offer various degrees of cross-breeding between EBRs and netbooks.

Some recent studies support this position. A recent consumer survey by In-Stat fuels this interpretation of the data by In-Stat analyst Stephanie Ethier: "Current e-book owners desire email capability in the next e-book they purchase. Longer battery life and Internet connectivity are the top two desired features among respondents who don’t currently own an e-book but plan to buy one in the next year." It sounds like people who don’t own EBRs now don’t realize how long batteries actually last, but it’s clear that Internet connectivity and email capability are serious market demands.

In other words, current and future owners of EBRs are not satisfied with the idea of an EBR being a single-purpose device. They want them to have at least some of the characteristics of netbooks, in addition to being well-designed text-readers. Of course, if you’re doing email on your EBR, you’re going to want to see fully formatted HTML emails, and you’ll soon want to open and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments. Now you have a netbook, although it’s one with a large, slow, reflective, monochrome display. The addition of WiFi and G3/G4 transceivers, significant additional storage, and more processing power will reduce the time the device can operate on a battery charge, and could compromise the thin profile and light weight people expect of an EBR.

So we’ll see a variety of EBR/netbooks that mix, match, and prioritize different features for different market segments. To start with, we’ll have EBRs with some netbook-like features; then we’ll have netbooks with some EBR-like features. And after that things will get really interesting.

If you start from the netbook side, an EBR-type display appears to be out of the question. If you start from the EBR side, suddenly a slow, light, thin, low-power monochrome display for a netbook/EBR with some netbook characteristics, but optimized to be a good EBR, seems entirely possible.

Of course, the existence of such a product, which is not far off, will speed the development of electrophoretic displays with full color and faster refresh speeds, and may open the door for newer types of ePaper displays with color and video-compatible refresh rates.