Plastic Logic cancels Que e-reader
In a move that will probably surprise few, Plastic Logic announced Tuesday that it's canceling plans for its pricey Que e-reader. — Plastic Logic had already delayed the Que several times after showing early versions of the product for years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Plastic Logic has been telegraphing this for months. After partnering with Barnes & Noble in July 2009 to take on the Kindle, it spent years showing early versions of the Que before finally putting a production model on stage at CES in January 2010 — pitched as a paperless briefcase for business documents, priced well above mainstream readers. Repeated shipping delays followed, and Tuesday's cancellation confirms what the delays suggested.
The strategic problem was timing as much as price: by mid-2010 the Que's premium business-reader niche sat between Amazon's mass-market Kindle and Apple's iPad, which had just reset expectations for what a $500-plus screen device should do. A canceled product leaves Barnes & Noble holding a content partnership with no dedicated Plastic Logic hardware attached to it.
First-order effects
- Barnes & Noble's 2009 bet on Plastic Logic loses its hardware anchor overnight — the retailer must route its e-book ambitions through its own Nook line rather than a partner device.
- Plastic Logic forfeits years of development spending on the Que with no revenue-generating product to show for it, and any preorders or channel commitments tied to the reader collapse.
Second-order effects
- The cancellation clears the premium e-reader tier for incumbents: Amazon faces one fewer high-priced competitor, while Apple's iPad effectively inherits the business-document audience the Que was built to court.
- Barnes & Noble's openness strategy — opening its bookstore to third-party devices — now matters more than any single hardware alliance, pushing the retailer to deepen ties with whichever manufacturers actually ship.
Third-order effects
- For plastic-electronics display makers, the pattern points away from building branded consumer devices against entrenched rivals and toward licensing the underlying flexible-display technology to those who can.
- The episode adds to a recurring lesson in hardware: multi-year delays on a single-premium-device strategy tend to end in cancellation once a platform player redefines the category's price-performance envelope.
The trend: Dedicated e-reader hardware is consolidating around a few mass-market platforms, squeezing out premium single-purpose devices and pushing component innovators toward licensing instead of retail products.