Some predict Apple's iPad will eat up the entire e-reader market, but it may not be too late for Amazon or Sony. These e-reader makers could get a competitive edge by offering a much cheaper device and a new technological development could make this happen.

A new chip by Freescale Semiconductor Inc. could help reduce the price of e-readers to less than $150 this year, according to Bloomberg.

Glen Burchers, a marketing director for the formerly Motorola-run company, said Freescale will begin to offer samples of a new processor that takes on the functions of other chips and reduces e-reader costs.
Freescale's processor could not only take up the function of the display chip, reducing the time it takes to turn a page on the e-reader from two seconds to half a second, but could also drive the cost of these devices down.

Amazon, the reigning king of the e-reader market, currently uses Freescale's technology in its Kindle device. While Amazon's most modest e-reader sells for $259, the company's most deluxe e-reader has a pricey $489 price tag. Sony Corp.'s e-reader, which also utilizes Freescale's chips, retails for almost $200.

French daily newspaper Le Figaro has announced details of its plans to charge for online content, offering three different tiers of subscriptions.

The three levels will be called Connect, Select and Business. Connect is a free subscription that allows access to free email newsletters with general, cultural and financial news. It also enables users to comment on articles and create a personalised front page.

Select also offers these features, and in addition, it includes more in-depth news, and specialist reporting on politics, culture, and international news. It features a selection of articles from The New York Times translated into French, access to the digital edition of the newspaper from 3am, 30 archived articles a month, and access to networks of other subscribers with common interests. Subscribers can publish their own articles and ask questions directly to Le Figaro's journalists about a particular theme of the news. All of this will cost subscribers €8 a month, with the first month free.

The third level, Business, gives subscribers access to everything included in Select, but with 90 archived articles a month instead of 30. It will also add a morning and afternoon economics newsletter, as well as news about business and management, a business-focused social network, and a concierge service for restaurant and travel bookings. It will cost €15 a month.

In what seems to be the latest move in the battle of the e-readers, Amazon has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch screen technology, to possibly update its Kindle e-reader so it can better compete with Apple's iPad.

The New York Times reports that Amazon will merge Touchco's technology and staff members into its Kindle hardware division, Lab126, based in Cupertino, California, a source briefed on the deal said on Wednesday.
The Kindle, with its slow-to-load, black and white display, could receive a much-needed facelift with Touchco's flexible and multitouch technology. Touchco, which began as a project at the Media Research Lab at New York University, had roughly six employees and had not yet turned its scientific know-how into a commercial product before Amazon bought it, says the NYT. However, Touchco's technology is quite promising because it can deliver a color touch screen that can detect different kinds of pressure and an unlimited number of touch points. But, the best part of the deal by far is its cost - Touchco can produce a touch screen with all of these capabilities at a considerably lower price than the ones Apple used on the iPad and the iPhone.

Nieman Lab's Johnathan Stray has created a paywall calculator, Paywall!, that aims to juggle the different factors that could go into building a paywall and find the best combination that could generate maximum revenue. He takes the New York Times' proposed payment model as a basis: a certain number of articles per month can be viewed free, and after that readers will be asked to subscribe.

"The key to paywall revenue projections is to understand how different portions of the audience are affected differently," says Stray, and his model breaks the audience into five groups based on their number of page views per month: fly-by, occasional, weekly, daily, loyal. Depending on how many articles are offered free, it is unlikely that a huge number of visitors will be affected by a paywall, Stray points out, but the ones that will be are the loyal readers. According to Stray's tests using different scenarios fed into the calculator, "a tuned paywall can make money for a large free site, but the details matter greatly. Reader reaction is key; small variations in response have big effects on net revenue." There is clearly no sure way to say whether or not a paywall will work: it will always be a gamble.