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Amazon Kindle Fire vs. Sony Reader Clearly a more-colorful bookshelf. |
The force behind the decline
of course is the tablet, which does everything an e-reader can and much, much more.
As a result, shipments of e-book
readers are expected to fall to 14.9 million units by year-end, down 36 percent
from the 23.2 million units shipped in 2011, according to estimates from the research firm IHS iSuppli.
In fact, 2011 appears to have
been the peak year for the e-book reader—the same year in which Amazon.com
released the Kindle Fire, making the tablet affordable and light enough to hold
comfortably while reading.
ISuppli predicts another
steep decline in e-book readers will occur next year, with a 27 percent
contraction to 10.9 million units. By 2016 that number will fall to 7.1 million
units.
“The rapid growth—followed by
the immediate collapse—of the e-book [reader] market is virtually unheard of,
even in the notoriously short life cycle of products inhabiting the volatile
consumer electronics space,” the report notes.
The e-book reader popped into
existence in 2006, and between 2008 and 2010, shipments grew from 1 million to
10.1 million, up by a factor of 10.
But the tablet phenomenon has
been even more powerful. Tablet shipments are expected to hit 120 million in
2012, only two years after Apple launched the iPad, the device that has driven
the market.
The report expects that number
to hit 340 million by 2016.
Fortunately for makers of e-readers
including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, they saw the future coming and morphed
their e-readers into low-end tablets.
In the case of Amazon, its
Kindle Fire wound up being the first serious challenger to the
market-dominating iPad, after failed attempts by companies including Samsung
Electronics and Hewlett-Packard.
And both the Kindle Fire and
Barnes & Noble’s Nook are reading-centric tablets, which has certainly
steered consumers toward spending a bit more and buying a tablet over a reader.
For reading, the devices beat
out the iPad—as readers, at least—by being lighter and easier to hold.
They also top e-book readers
in many ways. In addition to clicking on a word for a dictionary definition, with
a tablet readers get Internet searches, pictures, video, and more to enhance
their reading experience.
And then there are all the
other things they can do with their device: playing games, watching Netflix and
YouTube and ESPN, and . . . well, a lot of things
that distract them from reading.
Of course, to some degree it
is not so much the death of one device as the evolution into something better,
along with the accompanying name change.
The e-book reader is in
effect a simple tablet computer, able to display books and offer other basic
functions such as searching dictionaries, playing music, and so forth.
And with technology improving
and cost coming down, the black-and-white, non-Internet-connected e-book reader
appears to be turning its final pages.
By John Sailors
(c) 2012 by Story Crest Press. All rights reserved.
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