Sound expensive? The 14-inch Kno has the same relationship to the 6-inch Kindle that college textbooks have to trade paperbacks. Textbooks are big, heavy, they cost a lot of money, they’ve got expensive illustrations and the publishers are all different.

At least, that’s Kno’s pitch. Kno doesn’t compare itself to other e-readers, or even other tablets. It compares itself to new textbooks, which may help justify its high prices. Considering the thousands of dollars students spend on books, the company says — and the tens of thousands they and their parents spend on college — $600 for an entry-level unit is a bargain.

“Kno’s extraordinary benefits represent only a tiny fraction of the overall cost of college, but its impact on the student’s career — and the energy it adds to the experience, the thrill of learning, and the ultimate grade — is dramatic,” said Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno. “Even better, when you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital-textbook costs.”

That figure is misleading, since it assumes a student purchases all their books new and doesn’t sell them used. What’s more, Rashid, founder of textbook-borrowing site Chegg, knows it.

The Kno is an extremely capable device and deserves to be sold on its own merits. It’s got either one or two 1440 x 900 LCD touchscreens that support both fingertip navigation and stylus notetaking. It supports either a virtual or a Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s backed up by an impressive library of electronic textbooks.

It doesn’t have third-party apps, which will make parents happy: It’s built to read, write and browse the web. But it can play the major audio and video formats, including Flash. It’s got an NVidia Tegra 2 graphics chip with an A9 dual-core 1-GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. Despite this giant display of video power, it still claims up to six hours of battery life on “normal campus use” (whatever that means).

The Kno is heavy by e-reader and tablet standards; it’s 2.6 pounds for the single-screen, 5.6 pounds for the dual-screen. But again, that’s not necessarily the relevant comparison. Compared to a bag full of first-year biology and calculus textbooks, 5.6 pounds is light as a feather.

A lot of companies have tried to make e-reading work for academic textbooks and, so far, none have succeeded. It’s more complicated than direct-to-consumer trade publication, because there are just so many stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, authors, publishers, retailers. The timing is tough because the economy is forcing many people to curtail their academic spending, not ramp it up on new gadgets — which is one reason the company is pushing the money-saving angle.

But Kno’s hardware looks good, the pricing is high but reasonably competitive, the company’s strategy is sound and its people understand those complexities as well as anyone.

I think we can expect a gradual rollout of the product this semester for holiday-season early adopters, and if it’s successful, a big push for back-to-school next fall. We’ll just have to see whether it clicks.

Kno Announces Pricing and Pre-Order Availability for Tablet Textbook; Pays for Itself in 3 Semesters [Press Release]

See Also:

• Kno Creates 14-inch Tablet for Students
• Kno Releases Details and Video of Multi-Screen Reading Tablet …
• Dual-Screen Tablet Maker Hopes to Reinvent the Textbook
• Size Matters to Students, Says 14-Inch Tablet Maker
• First All-Digital Science Textbook Will Be Free
• A Free Digital Biology Textbook – Video – Wired
• Startup Gives Digital Textbooks the Ol' College Try

Authors: Tim Carmody

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