E-book devices haven't exactly taken the world by storm, but there's plenty of hope for them yet, according to Bill Gates. "Reading is going to go completely online," said Microsoft's chairman this week at the company's Strategic Account Summit, in Seattle.
Mr. Gates acknowledged that the size and cost of e-book readers have kept many people from doing more digital reading. But those disincentives won't last forever, he said:
Today, for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print. As the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we'll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today."
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Microsoft Blog has more excerpts from Mr. Gates's presentation. –Brock Read
