Last year I was arguing with a novelist on Twitter about the future of the E-Reader. The novelist’s view was that as the cost of tablets continued to decline, people would choose to buy both a tablet and an E-Reader. As much as I love E-Reader’s, my view was that the E-Reader as we know it is doomed to quickly become a legacy technology.
Sadly, The Wall Street Journal reports that the death of E-Readers is upon us,
Market-researcher IDC recently estimated 2012 global e-reader shipments at 19.9 million units, down 28% from 27.7 million units in 2011. By contrast, IDC’s 2012 tablet forecast is 122.3 million units.
Specialized devices for reading e-books have been hot sellers for five years – but one market-research company forecasts a significant decline in 2014. The WSJ’s Greg Bensinger explains why the introduction of lighter tablets may spell the end of the e-reader era.
IHS iSuppli comes up with different totals, but it sees a similar trend. It estimates that shipments of dedicated e-readers peaked in 2011 and predicts that 2012 shipments slid to 14.9 million units, down 36% from a year earlier. By 2015, it expects unit sales of dedicated e-readers to be just 7.8 million.
I don’t have any special attachment to dedicated e-readers themselves, but rather to the e-ink display technology.
I own a tablet and have read a few books on it, but that glossy glare-filled screen is far from ideal for some serious reading. It is okay for reading web pages, but if I’m going to read a 400 page novel I’m busting out my e-reader.
But I’m definitely part of an extremely small niche market, and once tablets fall below a certain price there won’t be much rationale left for still making them. Dedicated e-ink readers will probably always remain available from niche sellers (much like my beloved Alphasmart Neo), but they will likely vanish as a mainstream product.