A new company called Kno has created a large 14-inch tablet geared for students and electronic textbooks. The only problem is this has been tried before and it failed terribly.
At 14.1 inches, the display of the Kno tablet will be much bigger than the iPad, which some consumers already feel is too big.
It will have an LCD touch-screen display and let users take notes, highlight text, or even doodle in the margins.
The only problem here is that this is not a new idea. Amazon tried the same thing with the Kindle DX, a device with a 9.7-inch display that was predominantly marketed as a college textbook replacement.
But something funny happened when Amazon went out and did market research. It found that students actually prefer having giant, bulky textbooks. It helps to be able to skim through a book, dog-ear pages, and follow along in class.
Where Kno could possibly succeed is in a second version of the tablet: a dual-screen device that will more accurately simulate the feeling of a real book.
Kno also has a unique idea by working with textbook publishers to let consumers just buy one chapter at a time. Additionally, students really hated load times on the Kindle so if Kno can cut back on that it has a chance.
So it’s doing some interesting stuff that Amazon never bothered with. But still, nothing can change the feeling that students get from thumbing through a physical textbook.
The Dual Screen version of the tablet will be “under $1000” and the single-screen one will be “absolutely cheaper,” according to quotes from Kno CEO Osman Rashid on Tech Crunch.
