E-books and e-book readers have been hot gadgets for quite some time now. In 2009, the market for e-book readers rocketed and one of the most important driving factors was the release of the Amazon Kindle.0 in February of that year. Amazon followed up with the release of their Kindle DX large display model in the summer of 2009 and, in the last six months of the year, it seemed as if electronics manufacturers were getting in line to launch e-book readers of their own in order to secure a share of the 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, without a doubt, the industry standard that had to be matched and then beaten.
However, there was no sign of any reader which was about to knock the Kindle off the number one spot. Until the release of the Apple iPad - a completely different type of device - there really was no credible threat to the Kindle. 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 introduced a new Wi-Fi only Kindle for just $ 139 for customers who didn't have any need for 3G connectivity. If you consider that the Kindle 2.0 launch price was $ 359 in February of 2009, that’s a hefty price reduction. It takes the Kindle – and e-book readers in general – much nearer to the sub $ 100 impulse buying price range for personal electronic devices. It's debatable whether or not the iPad's release prompted this. Not only would the price reduction would have happened anyway, but there is still a lot of room for downward price adjustment – and probably in the not too distant future.
However, whilst Amazon and Apple may be enjoying a good deal of success, 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. The Skiff reader, from Sprint and Hearst has been shelved.
Are we heading towards a polarised market with Amazon dominating the low cost “pure” e-book reader sector and Apple cleaning up in 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 big. Is there room between the two devices, in terms of both price and specification levels, for other players to enter the market?
Amazon recently announced that sales figures for Kindle books have overtaken the sales of hard cover books. 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 seems that e-books could well be the future of reading, but just what kind of device will you choose to read them on?
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