Recently it’s felt like everyone is jumping into the e-reader business, hoping to take a chunk of Amazon’s business.  Apple, with its mysterious, much-anticipated tablet device; Plastic Logic with its forthcoming digital reader; even Hearst and News Corp have sniffed out the category. Who isn't interested in getting into digital readers? Microsoft, for one.

Microsoft Entertainment and Devices division president Robbie Bach spoke out on the topic of e-readers last week. Said Bach, “For Microsoft producing a device, we’re actually pretty selective about which ones we want to get into, in part because we know what it takes to scale hardware businesses like that.” He added, “You know, if and when we do devices, we’re going to pick areas where we know there’s big scale.”

Bach makes a good point. The scalability of e-readers isn't clear. For now, in spite of Kindle’s success, e-readers are still a niche business—especially from the vantage point of a Big Tech company like Microsoft. And if tablet PCs take off— or if users gravitate towards e-reading on mobile devices—specialized e-readers like Kindle may become redundant. Although Microsoft professed little interest in producing digital readers, it did leave the possibility of Windows Embedded operating systems for e-reader type devices open. Source: paid Content, more