Cockamamie!

From the Amazon boards, here's an AP article ostensibly wondering if e-readers are a fad, or the future or reading. One amusing quote: "'It's cockamamie to think a product like that is going to revolutionize the way most people read,'" analyst Michael Norris of Rockville, Maryland research firm Simba Information Co. said in an e-mail."

The article amuses me because it's confused. Its title is "E-reading: Revolution in the making or fading fad?" It then associates e-reading with EInk and talks about how the iPad has already sold 9 million units, "whose five-month sales history has left their one-dimensional models (Kindle and Sony) struggling to keep up." The rest of the article goes on about the competition between dedicated e-readers and tablets. There are no figures given at all to suggest that e-reading is a "fading fad"-- quite the contrary, they say "Sales (of dedicated Eink devices) in 2010 — four years after the first devices hit the market — will probably reach 10 million units, according to Austin, Texas based research firm Display Search, up from the four million sold in 2009."

In short, the headline is on the sensational side, and has very little to do with the article.