Originally a niche occupied by key players such as Amazon.com
and Sony, the e-reader market has the potential to expand rapidly in the near term,
thanks to a host of factors ranging from price point to the age of users. In
turn, this could help drive the flat-screen devices into small to medium-sized
businesses and the enterprise in a big way.
The mindshare of e-readers within the consumer market has already begun to
expand. In the second quarter of 2008, some 37 percent of people surveyed by
research firm Forrester had never heard of an e-reader, while another 38
percent said they had heard of the devices but never seen one. A year later,
the number of those reporting they had never heard of e-readers dropped to 17
percent, while the number of those saying they had heard but never seen one
increased to 40 percent.
Over the same period, the number of those surveyed who actually owned an
e-reader crept incrementally upward, from 0.6 percent in 2008 to 1.5 percent in
2009.
Amazon.com’s aggressive campaign for its Kindle line of e-reader devices,
and counter-moves by Sony and other companies, has helped push e-readers into
the collective consciousness.
Click
here for a look at the debut of the Kindle DX.
Realizing the utility to business, many of the major e-reader manufacturers
have started integrating features into their devices designed to be of
particular use in reading office materials. The upcoming e-reader from Plastic
Logic utilizes AT&T’s 3G network to download material, including PDF, Word
and PowerPoint documents, onto the device. (Plastic Logic will also feature the
Barnes & Noble eBookstore, with 700,000 titles and 500,000 free
public-domain books from Google.)
The Plastic Logic Reader is scheduled to hit the marketplace in early 2010.
Its screen size of 8.5 by 11 inches is designed specifically to one-up the
9.7-inch screen on the Kindle DX, on which Amazon.com also intended to display
business documents in addition to books. The
Kindle DX became a bestseller soon after its June 2009 release.
However, the Kindle DX retails $489 and the Kindle 2 for $299, opening a
point of vulnerability that other e-reader manufacturers are attempting to
exploit. On Aug. 5, Sony announced that it will release two new e-readers at
the end of August, a $199 Reader Pocket Edition and a $299 Reader Touch
Edition, which will either match or undercut Amazon.com’s price points.
The Forrester report, issued on July 29, found that while the "early
adopters" of e-readers were willing to pay higher prices, a second wave of
adopters will be younger and more likely to snatch up a $99 device that
connects wirelessly for book and document downloading. It also detailed a group
of later adopters, likely to be women who currently buy or borrow approximately
2.7 books a month and will want a $149 or $99 price point.
"Whereas Amazon was perfectly positioned to sell to the first wave of
e-reader adopters, this group may be more likely to buy from a retailer like
Wal-mart or Target," wrote report author Sarah Rotman.
A lower price point could make e-readers more appealing to SMBs and the
enterprise, which could issue the devices to their mobile workers. At a cost of
$99, the price of an e-reader would undercut even that of a mininotebook, or
"netbook."
Another x-factor in the e-reader discussion is Apple,
which
rumor suggests is planning on releasing a Mac Tablet computer with multitouch
capability within the next year. By offering similar flat-screen
functionality as the devices by Amazon.com, Sony and Plastic Logic, Apple has
the potential to straddle both the e-reader and mobile computing markets.
According to analysts from research company Piper Jaffray, the Apple tablet
device will likely feature a 7- to 10-inch screen, and be sold at a price point
somewhere in the $500 to $1,000 range. Although no word has leaked as to the
final form of the tablet’s operating system, there is a chance it could run
Amazon.com’s Kindle of iPhone App, which would make the device both an e-reader
and an upscale netbook.
If an Apple tablet device rolls out as scheduled by the end of 2010, along
with a similar wave of Windows-centric tablet PCs by Dell and other
manufacturers, it could potentially squish widespread adoption of cheap
e-readers as business tools: The Forrester report predicted that "it will
take a few years … for e-reader prices to come down enough for [later adopters]
to afford them." In the meantime, SMBs and the enterprise may decide that
a more expensive tablet PC with e-reader capability, as opposed to a dedicated
reader device, may be a better use of their IT budget.
But the Forrester report suggests there’s also a substantial chance that
Amazon will continue to dominate the e-reader market in the coming years, with
other manufacturers attempting to introduce competing devices into the
ecosystem. As the recent emergence of Plastic Logic shows, at least some of
those manufacturers may try to target SMBs and the enterprise specifically, in
which case, the typical stack of papers in a briefcase could very well be
replaced by a tablet with a 9-inch E Ink screen.
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