The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Innovation: Electronic Readers on the Horizon
The WSJ awards in innovation are out and e-Reader technology is high on their list. Other publications like the SF Chronicle have also recently featured e-Readers as break-out technologies. The Amazon Kindle helped originally stake out and define the market, but the Kindle is now beginning to come up against competition.
“I think the market is on the verge of exploding, not only in the U.S. but worldwide,” said Neil Jones, inventor of the
Cool-er e-reader. “I’m thrilled to be part of this marketplace because it’s potentially immense.”
Forrester estimates that 1 million e-Readers were sold last year with Amazon’s Kindle taking about 60 percent of those sales and the Sony e-Reader grabbing most of the remaining 40 percent. The market has doubled over the last year and it is expected to grow to 13 million by 2013.
e-Readers may be the technology that ECM has been missing in its attempt to achieve the as-yet unreachable dream of the paperless office. On the one hand ECM is being hyped as a green technology replacing mounds of paper and file cabinets. But reading documents on workstations or laptops is not a friendly user experience compared to the feel and experience of paper. ECM also makes the retrieval and printing of documents so easy that a lot of paper still gets generated — some say that rather than less paper, ECM has actually encouraged more paper creation.
But the technology has advanced far enough so that e-Readers look like they might start to catch on. e-Readers are making the electronic display of text and graphics something more personal and more portable than has been ever possible before. And more advances can only be expected as the market segment continues to grow. Maybe we are finally getting closer to the realization of the paperless office.
