New gadget wants a slice of Apple
Rashid’s ability to disrupt an oligopolistic market that enjoys fat margins hasn’t gone unnoticed. Kno’s inaugural product is a sub-$1,000 tablet with a 14-in. (36.5 cm) color touchscreen. Buyers can opt for either 16 or 32 gigabytes of flash memory. A dual-pane model will be available as well. Both have software for downloading and viewing […]
Rashid’s ability to disrupt an oligopolistic market that enjoys fat margins hasn’t gone unnoticed. Kno’s inaugural product is a sub-$1,000 tablet with a 14-in. (36.5 cm) color touchscreen. Buyers can opt for either 16 or 32 gigabytes of flash memory. A dual-pane model will be available as well. Both have software for downloading and viewing digital textbooks, which Kno plans to sell at 30% to 50% discounts. Although the tablet won’t be in students’ hands until Christmas, the company has already raised some $55 million — and plenty of eyebrows. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, creator of the first popular Web browser, Mosaic, is Kno’s largest investor and most vocal supporter. He says the Kno is a killer app: “Today’s experience of buying and carrying around textbooks is awful and expensive. Other tablets can’t display a textbook page because the screen is too small. The screens literally can’t support the textbooks.”
Actually, electronic textbooks are already available on the iPad. Students at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and elsewhere are using the free Inkling application to buy and read digital versions of five textbooks, including the best seller Biology by Peter Raven. Students can buy the book for a hefty $150 or pay $3.99 a chapter. Inkling founder Matt MacInnis promises hundreds more titles to follow. Other iPad apps offer digital textbooks as well.
MacInnis thinks the Kno is really a Kno-go because the price is too high for a relatively dumb gadget: “Who’s going to buy a $1,000 device when they can go and buy an iPad for half the price that does 10 times as many things?” Andreessen says MacInnis misses the point. “A student is comparing a Kno to a backpack of physical textbooks. They are not comparing it to an iPad,” he says, adding that college students already spend an average of $800 a year on books.
What’s certain is that the $4 billion college-textbook market is ripe for a digital makeover. Research firm Simba Information estimates that digital-textbook sales will soar from just 2% of the total market in 2009 to 11.5% in 2013.
For electronic textbooks to take off, however, they need to be more than glorified PDF files. The Kno will let students write class notes with a stylus, insert notes on a page and collaborate with other users via wi-fi. The two-pane version lets students hold one page in place while flipping through on the second pane in order to, say, hunt down a physics formula.
Critics say the Kno’s large screen — the same kind that’s used in the MacBook Pro notebook — makes it too big. But beta tester Darshan Shankar, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks otherwise. “I can read two pages of text on it without straining my eyes,” he says. He also likes taking notes with the stylus. “The iPad doesn’t have a stylus, so I’d have to be taking notes with my finger.” Kno plans to make its browser-based software available on other tablets as well. Dozens of iPad clones have been announced for 2011.
Tailored to view digital textbooks, the Kno will almost certainly be a niche product to start, but Rashid doesn’t see that as a liability. The same was true for the electronic calculator in the early 1970s. “For me, it is about customers saying it is great and recommending it to others,” he says. “Kno doesn’t have to sell 10 million units in a year to be a success. We do not have that kind of pressure.” That’s a business lesson in itself.
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