Whether the craze for e-books is caching up or not, but market for e-book readers definitely seem to be gaining momentum. After PI, we have another player known as WINK joining this market now. EC Media (International) Pvt. Ltd, a Bangalore-based company which has been working on “Wink” for past one year, plans to start selling its new e-book reader from 15th of August’10.
Wink’s basic model with a six-inch screen will be priced at Rs 8,000, while the nine-inch advanced version will cost Rs 22,000. The six-inch screen has resolution of 800×600 pixels and weighs 260g with battery whereas the advanced model (1024×768-pixel resolution) weighs 430g. This multi-functional e-reader supports more than 15 regional languages and Chennai-based technology outsourcing company California Software Co. Ltd will provide the technology support for it (via).
Features:
- The WINK comes with a 16 shade grayscale screen with a 6 inch / 9 inch wide display and large memory
- Touch screen and non-touch screen versions of the product
- An additional QWERTY keyboard to ease annotation experience
- Supports multiple regional languages
- Text-to-speech(TTS) support for English with Audio Listener(mp3)
- Search & Highlight, Font-adjustable features included
- Digital content meant for download stored under a Digital Rights Management system in a centralized server
- Seamless connectivity pan India via GPRS& WiFi
- 3G with touch-screen models in the roadmap
- Includes Browser, an email client and Games
- Embedded eBook Catalogue for purchase
- SDK: Provided to third party developers for developing applications like Games, mobile banking, UI customization, etc.
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EC Media was set up in 2009 by DC Books, a 30-year-old publishing house based in Kerala and since their forte being into publishing, Wink claims to be going to have strong digital content – both in terms of books as well as journals.
Though the price is cheaper than other existing products but then even Amazon has announced the launch of Kindle 3 and a six inch kindle now actually costs $139 only (approx Rs. 6,400). If we see the sales statistics till now, Kindle has managed to sell close to 2000 copies in India and PI has this figure in tens of thousands, do you think this is the right time to launch yet another new e-book reader in this market?
With no price advantage and not so easy acceptance of e-book readers in India, do you think Wink is going to survive the competition of Amazon & PI?
