informationToys

E-book readers have been quite the hot gadget for a fair while now. The market for e-book readers really took off in 2009, and one of the most important influences on this was the launch of Amazon’s 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 equalled 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. Shortly after the release of the upgraded third generation Kindle in August 2010 Amazon, for the umpteenth time it seems, had sold out of the devices and prospective customers faced a wait of several weeks before their new readers could be shipped.

Of course, the fact that the latest upgrades were accompanied by a further price cut might go some way to explaining the resurgence in the popularity of the Kindle. Amazon’s new Wi-Fi only Kindle was priced at just $ 139. If you remember 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. Whether this was prompted by the appearance of the iPad on the scene is probably a moot point. 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.

However, whilst Amazon and Apple may be enjoying a good deal of success, the same cannot be said for other e-book reader manufacturers. Several planned e-book readers have either been postponed or cancelled all together. The Plastic Logic Que reader, for example, is pretty well dead in the water. Dutch company Irex, a previously well established business, has gone bankrupt after disappointing US sales of their Irex reader. The Skiff reader, from Sprint and Hearst has been cancelled.

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? There’s a large gap in the prices of the Kindle and the iPad. Is there room between the two devices, in terms of both price and specification levels, for other players to enter the market?

Amazon recently advised 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 looks like e-books may well be the future of reading, but just what type of device will you choose to read them on?