I think the real apps for e-ink is in education and maybe health. Textbooks seems like a no brainer to me. Maybe in health, it would be neat for a doctor to keep an e-reader in his pocket as he makes the rounds. She could access health records and maybe keep someone from giving the wrong drug to the wrong person.

Given that medicare has just announced they are no longer paying to fix problems caused by the hospital, the right incentives might be in place for that application to go mainstream.

In advertising, I don’t see it. But then I think advertising as a business model is going away anyway.

To a certain extent e-ink is, at least for the moment, technology for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that, but one does wonder what the real value of this is, except as an emerging technology. And with the circuit board it is pretty unwieldy.

I’m looking forward to version 2.0