The battle over the eReader space is mostly about two things: exclusive content agreements and form factor, and in the format wars, it looks like Skiff is the biggest and best looking of all of the eReaders announced to date, but we wonder if bigger-is-better makes for a winner in this hotter-than-hot competitive market.

The Skiff content business model, unlike most others which are download or subscription-based, is dependent in part on the ability of the device to deliver actionable advertising, so this big 11.5" touchscreen display will need to stuff in more than just content.  So, even though the display is huge and it is beautiful and very high resolution (1600x1200), we don't really know yet if the final product will deliver more content than much smaller displays.  Really, it depends on advertising, and if Skiff decides to go with popup and slide-out advertising like many websites have done this year, users may feel more like using this device as a frisbee than an eReader.

A few years ago, LG showed off a new ePaper enabling technology and a mockup of the "newspaper of the future" and the Skiff is the first to employ the technology that LG actually developed.  At the time this technology was developed, however, newspapers were still a dominant and financially successful form of news and information delivery, so we all thought that a large format reader would be required to move newspapers and magazines into the digital revolution.  In the intervening years, however, users have learned to receive and filter their news in ever-smaller devices, and so we wonder if the large format display is going save the newspaper and magazine behemoths from continued decline, and we wonder if full-page and large-format advertisements are going to become a thing of the past.  If the old publishing paradigm does have a chance of survival, devices like the Skiff reader are their only chance, but we think it may be too little too late.