Taiwan based E-Ink Holdings, the developers behind e-ink in many popular E-Readers, is ready to take the plunge into Non-English markets to ride out the growing popularity in electronic readers.
E-Ink has formed a partnership with Shanda Interactive Entertainment, the largest publishing company in China, to produce e-readers. Recently a subsidiary of Shandra launched their own e-reader for 99 yuan or $14.86 US. Suffice to say out of the 3000 units they had to sell, they were sold out in 3 days.
The Partnership between E-Ink Holdings and Shanda is strategic for both parties. Shanda is in the top 3 for publishing companies in China, whose economy and population continue to grow. Shanda also produces a wide array of content such as online serial novels. These novels are updated daily and add about 1 million words to their library every day. Shanda loves this growing niche because it represents cheap content and with no great copyright liabilities.
Apart from this new relationship with E-Ink Holdings, they have also partnered up with a yet unnamed Russian company to produce e-readers for them. Also they have not been idle in the English markets as well, they recently collaborated with Acer for the Lumiread e-Reader.
There has been a lot of confusion on the topic of E-Ink – is it a technology, or is it a company? E-Ink holdings is Taiwan’s leading papermaking and printing group. They are a pioneer in TFT and ePaper and were recently known as Prime View International or PVI. Recently they acquired Hydis Technologies, manufacturer of the world’s best wide viewing angle LCDs and its 2009 acquisition of E Ink Corp, the worldwide leader in ePaper. E Ink is now the world’s largest supplier of displays to the eBook market. You can see e-Ink in almost every major e-reader such as the Kindle and Sony‘s line of electronic readers.
via Digitimes
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
