Tuesday, June 30, 2009

No Kindle in Germany / iriver japan's Libre

The Tech Herald reports, re the failure of talks to expand the Kindle to Germany:
' According to German magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has failed in his attempts to find common ground with T-Mobile and Vodafone, who apparently want to charge more money for wireless network access to the Kindle than Amazon is willing to shoulder. '


iriver japan's Libre
is launching soon in Japan.  Yet another 6" e-ink product, this one is being manufactured by Prime View International Co ltd (PVI) of Taiwan, which has signed a deal to buy E Ink of Massachusetts to coordinate their efforts.   iriver will become known as MouseComputer  [not your usual name upgrade] after an upcoming merger. Excerpts of mild interest:
' iriver Japan combined [the e-reader] with Foxit Software Company's software, such as the one that browses online news articles and converts them into PDF files...
The Libre is not capable of wireless communication...It will be sold only online.

 ' "Because of our low pricing, the profit margin of the Libre is small," said Shigeyoshi Asano, president of iriver Japan. "So, it is very difficult to sell it through volume retailers."

  ' The price has not been decided yet but is expected to be about ¥29,800 (approx US$312). We estimate that the company purchases the e-book reader from PVI for $150 to 200.
  ' The company expects unit sales of 1,000 per month...
At first, iriver Japan will not provide contents for the Libre, expecting the device to be used for reading news articles collected by Foxit Software's crawling software, PDF files prepared by the user and so forth...However, Asano said that iriver Japan is now in talks with newspaper companies and other content providers. '

In other technology news! "Toyota technology has brain waves move wheelchair." Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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