E-readers come in a variety of sizes
This past June the competition between various brands of e-readers suddenly turned serious. It started when Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook e-reader from $259 to $199, and introduced a $149 Wi-Fi version. Within hours Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle e-reader from $259 to $189. Shortly afterward, Borders responded by adding a $20 gift card to the purchase of their $149 Kobo, effectively reducing the price to $129. Several weeks later Sony followed suit lowering the price of its 3 e-readers up to $50.
Why all the sudden activity? Some experts say the trigger was the introduction of the $499 iPad in April. As of early August, the iPad had sold 3.3 million units. Apple’s iPad however, is not a dedicated e-reader. In spite of that fact, retail analysts have been surprised by the number of e-books purchased by iPad users – roughly 5 million downloads in the first 65 days, an average of 2.5 books per device.
Wikipedia currently lists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e-book_readers) 25 different manufacturers of e-readers. Combined sales of the Kindle, Nook, Kobo and other e-readers is expected to reach 6.6 million this year, compared with 3.1 million sold in 2009.
In July 2010 Amazon.com reported that during the 2nd quarter of 2010, sales of e-books for its proprietary Kindle outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time. At that time it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcovers. By July this number had increased to 180 Kindle e-books per 100 hardcovers. Paperback book sales are still much larger than either hardcovers or e-books. The American Publishing Association estimates that e-books make up about 8.5% of book sales as of mid-2010.
There seems to be no question that e-readers are here to stay. The question is, in what form? Aside from desktop and laptop computers, there are currently 3 options: the dedicated e-reader such as the Nook or Kindle, the smart phone and tablets like the iPad, which are essentially giant smart phones.
Will people want a separate device dedicated to reading books, or will they prefer to read on a multi-use device? I’d bet most people would prefer the multi-use device. What will the size of the device be? I can’t imagine reading entire book on a screen the size of current smart phones. Nor can I imagine carrying a tablet around everywhere I go. I suspect other options we can’t yet imagine are just around the corner.
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