Will convergence and slates kill the dedicated ebook reader?
Just as I was beginning to think that the Amazon Kindle/Barnes & Noble Nook model of delivering and displaying e- book content had become the established blueprint for ereaders, it turns out that electronics companies had other ideas, bunches of them, actually. The prevailing notion seems to be that consumers crave “convergence” in their devices, meaning they won’t settle for gizmos that do only one thing, even if they do it really well. One convergence-driven example that does E Ink ebooks is the two-screened Entourage eDGe (pictured below). Dubbed a “Dualbook,” it has a grayscale E Ink screen for reading and annotating on one side, flanked by a second, full-color touchscreen on the other, adding netbook-like functionality. Like the Kindle and Nook, the eDGe is attached to its own bookstore. Unlike them, it adds a second screen that’s part of a trend toward devices called tablets or slates, loosely defined as flat, touch-screen navigable computers without a physical keyboard. Accordin
