Acer Shelving eReader Product [Acer's Chairman Says Market Isn't Big Enough, Still Uncertainty]

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Last month Acer quietly announced a trio of new products, one of which was an eReader. We’re now learning that Acer has stopped development of their eReader project because of market uncertainty. Besides the fact, Acer Chairman Wang Jeng-tang said that “the size of the e-reader market is not that big”.

When Acer unveiled their plans for the eReader last month, they didn’t exactly have many details. We didn’t learn anything other than the fact they were working on one. It isn’t really clear how far along they were in development. Of course, the eReader market is flooded with product offerings. Sony, Amazon, Barnes and Noble have a few well known offerings while there are a ton of lesser known products out there (and you can’t forget the impending iPad from Apple).

Acer’s Jeng-tang also told reporters that the eReader industry has a whole had yet to come up with an established business model, with some eReader manufacturers selling their own books, and others depending on the users getting their own eBooks from somewhere.

Jeng-tang said that while production on the device has been stopped, they were still “studying the feasibility” of running a successful eReader marketplace. Acer is, of course, the world’s second largest computer manufacturer.

In the same press conference, Jeng-tang said that Acer was continuing to develop CULV notebooks. He says that they were frustrated by the low processing power of some CULV processors but Intel’s latest offerings in that space are good.