It's a bit like the Chicken and the Egg problem. You can't really use laptops to read textbooks. Once students all have low power readable tablets at $99, the affordable if not totally free access to all books and all textbooks is an obvious development. Even if the publishers will want to keep prices of digital versions of textbooks high, students will very easily be able to pirate them. This will force a new business model to monetize the work of authors. Such as one that is already used with libraries. Borrowing books from the library is free while authors are compensated directly accordingly with the popularity of their work through some sorts of taxes. Authors whos books are in libraries are compensated by how many times people borrows their books, which could be even more precisely counted using e-readers by counting the actual exact use and popularity of each ebook page.

Check the link, there is a picture of a working prototype at 10" and even a video of a working prototype with a 4.3" screen.

It's as good as e-ink for reading. Check my video: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/08/charbax-tests-pixel-qi-at-ces-2010/ I tested it only for a few minutes though, I didn't actually read much on it, just had time to check it out outdoors and indoors at Computex 2009 and at CES 2010 as I was filming those Pixel Qi videos. It's very very readable and the whole 10" screen currently uses less than 500 milliwatts which means potentially reaching 50 hours battery runtime using an ARM processor to turn e-book pages on a 3-cell netbook-sized battery.

They need to reach ARM Cortex A9 or good A8 with full hardware acceleration of Google Android for Laptops or Google Chrome OS software and Flash 10 support for full speed web browsing. Once they have that, which is really imminent, they will be selling huge amounts all over the market.

isupply.com usually makes Bill Of Material calculations on all these devices. They and other such industry analysts websites can inform on the component costs. Smart phones like iphone and Android phones are usually below $150 in Bill of Materials (+/- $30 depending on the screen quality and quality of other few components used) and it's usually below $10 in manufacturing costs.

If they are paid $2 an hour, it definitely doesn't take them 2 hours to assemble one such unit. Look everywhere for manufacturing costs of the iphone or any other Laptop, the actual cost to manufacture is always below $10.

Manufacturing costs in China are most likely below $5 per unit.

Screen is most of the cost, electronics only a small part, plastics even smaller, battery not an expensive high capacity one needed.

OLPC are working on something like this, and ARM Powered OLPC laptop, it is called the XO 1.75, it will likely be based on the Marvell Armada 610 or 510 processor, thus faster than this, and run 50 hours on a battery with the latest 100mw Pixel Qi screen, check my videos of that processor at CES 2010: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/18/marvell-slim-desktop-solution-ebox-based-on-the-marvell-armada-510-processor/ also running Chromium OS: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/14/marvell-runs-chromium-os-on-the-armada-510/

Surely if Google designs a perfect one and launches manufacturing of 10 million units, they can make them at $60 a piece and sell them on google.com/laptop for less than $100 also subsidized further by Google's online ads. The biggest cost of the laptop is the screen, using Pixel Qi the battery life can be upwards more than 20 hours even with a small cheap Laptop battery.

Check my other video with the founder of Epic Games: http://armdevices.net/2010/01/25/tim-sweeney-talks-about-unreal-engine-on-arm-powered-devices/ The full Unreal Engine and Quake3 type of OpenGL ES games and N64 and Dreamcast emulators can run on those ARM Powered Laptops.

Exactly, the telecom companies are dictating cell phone prices. If it weren't for those telecom companies, we would be able to buy unlocked Nexus Ones for less than $200 at the moment. Nexus One has faster ARM Cortex A8 processor, AMOLED screen, built-in HSDPA, better battery, 4x more RAM memory, kind of justifies why a Nexus One costs $150 to manufacture and this 7" laptop probably costs less than $80 to mass manufacture.

If you can read the full Slashdot homepage on 480x320 3.5" iphone screen, then surely you could read it too zoomed on a 800x480 7" screen (4x the size and 2.5x the resolution compared to the iphone). Though surely a 8.9" 1024x600 resolution screen would be nicer and would fit in the same form factor and maybe only add $20 to the cost of this device.

Yeah, logically it should be rather easy to put scroll bars, use up/down buttons for quick scrolling, remove touchscreen zoom options, move applications menu to the bottom left corner (like the Windows Start menu), and provide a Google Marketplace which filters apps that are best suited for laptop form factors. Optimaly, the full Chrome browser should launch within Android for Laptop form factors. I expect this is something Google will release soon.