From
Bobby Victor Kale - Research Mngr Cloud Apps, at Dell-Co Labs, Austin 8-1-10
"The eReader market seemed to be
bustling for the last 6 months, with the crescendo happening at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas earlier in the year.
And more and more Mobile Device Brokers and Liquidation Specialists are entering into this new market.
With the success of the iPad,
and other more affordable Slate PC’s, such as the Archos 7 which
displays full color, we have seen more consumers gravitating towards the multi-media driven devices, rather than
a device that just functions as an E-Reader.
Many mainstay eReader
companies over the last few years have closed up shop. For example, the
latest 12 filings for failure last month, and the eCool-Reader
are currently in court diving up their corporate assets.
Other more promising e-readers, such as the Plastic Logic, have refunded all of the existing pre-orders and canceled plans to release the product anytime
soon.
If you look at the trend, most e-readers that have failed
in the market place, or decided against even entering it. Although they have had viable products, they just could not
competitively meet the current device expectations.
“Companies
that had neither brand nor distribution have failed,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst for Forrester Research.
Many of the more popular e-readers right now, such as the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony E-Readers, and Kobo are all backed by large book stores and have direct ties to their entire
content network of electronic books. Which makes those products more viable for the end user because of an extensive selection,
which ranges in the hundreds of thousands of books to choose from.
Although
content distribution is not the only factor to make the big 4 popular with customers, there is also the price point. All of
the companies in the last few months have slashed prices on their e-readers. You can now buy a Kindle 2 for $189.00, a Nook
for $199 and Sony cut prices on every e-reader available.
The
price slashes seem to have worked. Amazon claims to have sold triple the amount of Kindles bringing the price down from $254
to $189 in a matter of months. More users are buying e-readers now that the price is in the 100.00 range.
This price slash on e-readers is directly linked to the success of the Apple
iPad. As we mentioned, users are gravitating more to multi-media devices, instead of buying the single-purpose E-Readers.
This is galvanizing electronic reader companies to use more feasible operating systems for expanded content, such as
Google Android, and its plethora of applications available. Even Amazon is hiring new staff for a new Web Browser, Email and
recently introduced Facebook and Twitter updates in its latest firmware update.
Although more people this year will buy tablet computers instead of e-readers, this does not mean that people
will give up on them completely. The Shift to Digital Books is indeed here to stay. Forrester Research estimates 6.6 million
e-readers will be sold in the United States this year. Approximately 29.4 million e-readers may be sold in the United States
by 2016, compared to 59 million tablets.
Earlier this week, Amazon
said for the first time sales of e-books are outstripping hardcovers. In June, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers.
In the first six months of the year, the company sold three times as many e-books as it did in the first half of 2009."
