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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockHawk who wrote (29893)	8/12/2000 3:59:18 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Hawk, Travel books would also seem an excellent market. Personally, it's not just the travel books that I'd be interested in but all the other reading material I take with me while traveling, such as the blackjack book. :) Seriuosly, anytime I get on an airplane I'm so weighted down with magazines and books that I'd likely make the compromise of using an e-book with its direct light instead of paper and ink which reflects light. --Mike Buckley

To: StockHawk who wrote (29893)	8/12/2000 10:51:05 PM
From: saukriver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Potential ebook markets College Students--should replace coursepacks. This market may be difficult to crack because of inertia. The problem is that the professor could care less about coursebacks (they do not use them; they just assign them and do not use). Students forced to buy them anyway at Kinko's etc. What students may want is normally quite secondary at most institutions of higher learning. It would require several universities getting behind this in order to market themselves/attract students. Could then market the university as both being on the cutting edge of technology and being sensitive to environmental concerns. If students at e.g., Yale, Duke, the University of Michigan, and UC Santa Cruz are carrying around ebooks, other universities might fall like lemmings Travel books--Paper travel books are far too weighty for a typical trip. (There is even a line of travel books that mysteriously is organized into "Restaurants," "Lodging," "Things to Do," etc. Delightful only if you want to spend travel time flipping across many pages to find the restaurants, lodging, things to do, etc. in the area you are located in.) If I know I am going to Cabo, I should be able to load in information about Cabo and perhaps some general information about Mexico. Don't need for the Cabo trip the material on rest of the Baja Penninsula, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, etc. Another market to consider would be magazines. Most people like to skim a magazine and then read certain parts of several magazines in depth. One should be able to download a magazine (to read across many subject areas) and also to download articles from many magazines in certain subject areas. One might, for example, read Time or Newsweek and also the business and sports (if those are your interests) articles you select from Time or Newsweek, Fortune, Industry Standard, etc. etc. That way you can skip reading art, style, and perhaps other sections that may not interest you. Most people just read a few areas of a magazine in which they have a keen interest. It would allow advertisers to keenly focus their pitches based on what stuff you download until . . . someone invents a way to block such ads. The book market is interesting. Going back to Dickens' time, books use to be sold as serials. Later, stories appeared in serial fashion in the Saturday Evening Post. There was a limited market who would have to buy the latest installment. In a way, Stephen King is almost attempting to replicate that historical tradition. saukriver

To: StockHawk who wrote (29893)	8/13/2000 6:54:37 PM
From: Snowshoe	Respond to of 54805

The goReader, an e-book with WIND inside This device is directly targeting college students... goreader.com goReader is currently negotiating alliances and partnerships with leading publishers and other content providers. goReader will conduct test classes with major universities in the fall of 2000, with the device and the first e-textbooks available for purchase immediately following. The seasoned management team brings a wealth of industry-relevant experience to goReader from companies such as Motorola, McGraw-Hill, Andersen Consulting, and Computer Science Corporation. Comments from Wind River: wrs.com The goReader e-textbook runs on Wind River's VxWorks RTOS using Java-based Personal JWorks technology to allow students to download an entire degree's worth of textbooks off the Internet, at a fraction of the cost of buying hard-copy books. ... When chairman and CEO of goReader, Rich Katzmann, sought help with product development, he found that Wind River was the only company that could meet the intense time-to-market demands, while providing superior back-end support and an attractive royalty structure. "In order for us to be the first to market, we needed to quickly and easily bring our idea from concept to reality," says Katzmann. "goReader chose Wind River software for our unique e-book because the value chain they offer -- with proven technology, support, and services -- is unmatched. That made it much easier to focus on our core value-add and get our product out the door quickly, so we could be one up on the competition. We would not hesitate to use Wind River for our future projects."