E-books and e-book readers have been hot gadgets for quite some time now. In 2009, the e-book reader market really took off, and one of the major influences in this was the launch of Amazon’s Kindle.0 in February of that year. Amazon followed up with the large format Kindle DX in the summer of 2009 and, in the second half of the year, it seemed that electronics manufacturers were queuing up to launch their own e-book readers and get a share of the hot new market. The fact that practically every new reader which displayed any potential was immediately christened the “Kindle Killer” should give some idea of just how influential Amazon was to the market’s development. The Kindle reader was, very definitely, the industry standard that required to be matched and then beaten.
However, there was very little evidence of a reader which was going to knock the Kindle off its throne. It wasn’t until the launch of the Apple iPad – a very different device – that there was any serious threat to the Kindle’s dominance. Even then, the forecast of the Kindle’s death as consumers turned en masse to the iPad doesn’t seem to be in evidence. Following the launch of the newly enhanced Kindle 3 in August 2010 Amazon, for the umpteenth time it seems, was out of stock of the devices and potential customers faced a wait of several weeks before their new readers could be shipped.
Certainly, the high sales figures of the upgraded Kindles were fuelled, to some extent at least, by a price reduction. Amazon’s new Wi-Fi only Kindle was priced at just $ 139. If you consider that the Kindle 2.0 was selling for $ 359 at its February 2009 launch, that’s a very significant price reduction. It positions the Kindle – and e-book readers in general – considerably nearer to the sub $ 100 impulse buying zone for electronic gadgets. It’s debatable whether or not the iPad’s release prompted this. The price reduction would have happened anyway, but there is still a lot of scope for further price cuts – and probably in the not too distant future.
Amazon and Apple may be enjoying a good deal of success, but the same cannot be said for other e-book reader manufacturers. A number of planned e-book readers have either been delayed or completely cancelled. The Plastic Logic Que reader, for example, is pretty well dead in the water. The Dutch company Irex, an apparently well established business, went bankrupt after US sales of their Irex reader failed to meet expectations. Sprint and Hearst’s planned Skiff has been cancelled.
Are we heading towards a polarised market with Amazon dominating the low cost “pure” e-book reader sector and Apple taking control of the pricier tablet computer that’s also used as an e-book reader market? The price difference between the Kindle and the iPad is fairly large. Is there enough room between the two devices, in terms of both price and specification levels, for new players to enter and compete in the market?
Recently Amazon announced that sales figures for Kindle books are outstripping hardback sales. It seems highly probable that e-book sales will catch up with and eventually overtake paperback sales – and probably in the not too distant future. It looks like e-books may well be the future of reading, but just what type of device will you choose to read them on?
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