Chairman of Taiwan-based E Ink Holding Scott Liu says he expects his company’s ereader shipments to double or triple in the second half of 2010 as price cuts drive volume. Liu now anticipates full-year shipments will exceed 10 million units in 2010. He also indicates that “vendors will soon be able to provide sub-US $100 e-book readers judging from the market growth, and E Ink will help clients further lower the production costs.” E Ink Holding produces the screens for clients including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Hanvon.
DigiTimes
Meanwhile, the king of overpriced ereader vaporware Plastic Logic has admitted what everyone already knew: their once-highly-anticipated oversized Que reader will never ship. CEO Richard Archuleta said: “We plan to take the necessary time needed to re-enter the market as we refocus, redesign and retool for our next generation ProReader product. We continue to perfect our core plastic electronic technology and manufacturing processes that are central to our product’s unique value proposition.” The company had cancelled all pre-orders for the device earlier this summer. It’s hard to see what they do for an encore, but after working through hundreds of millions in venture capital they have to try to come up with something.
SF Chronicle
For the biggest dreams of all, though, there’s a NYT blog column on Amazon’s Apple-like aspirations for their Lab 126 division. “According to people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans…Lab 126 has been looking into building other gadgets that it could sell to consumers. One of those people said building more hardware products would be a means to an end. This person said Amazon wants to make more devices for consumers that would enable simple purchasing of Amazon content including its digital books, music and movie rentals and purchases.”
The same source said they considered the mobile phone business but decided it “seemed out of Amazon’s reach.”