E-book readers require high performance, even to just display text.
Franck Nicholls, Freescale Semiconductor -- EDN, April 7, 2011
Many people assume that e-book readers require only minimum processing power to render a basic text page, but this assumption is wrong. Displaying text may be easy, but displaying it quickly—at the speed of paper—requires high performance. To ensure the wide acceptance of e-readers, they must provide a user experience closer to that of reading a good-old paper book and to the experience that traditional consumer-electronics devices offer. Today’s e-readers face these challenges: to be as quick as paper and as quick as LCD-based devices. High-performance microprocessors, such as those operating at 800 MHz on the ARM Cortex-A8 architecture, can enable better usability and new use scenarios for e-readers.