My guess would be that 90% of high school or college age kids own some kind of ipod or similar music playing device. What percentage of people this age are going to be interested in a dedicated ebook reading device? Maybe 2% or 3% at best.

So growth of electronic reading devices will be slow but steady. Especially when you consider the current state of DRM. Personally, I own a kindle but I’ve stopped buying ebooks altogether until DRM issues get sorted out. All I do now is scan the kindle store once a week to see what’s free.

I think super-growth in the market will eventually come, but only when you get the educational aspect of it folded in. My sense of eReaders right now is that they’re most useful to people who are avid readers and either travel a lot or have a problem with book storage. People like that (people like me) are great to sell to, because we keep buying. To move beyond that, you have to make the devices more useful to studens and schools. To me, that seems more like a 2015 kind of thing, but I’d love to be wrong.

For the next four years, the prediction is they they’ll only sell another 10 million – say 4 million in the next two years and six million in the following two?

That’s an incredibly slow growth rate in sales for an emerging technology market, where features are going to rapidly increase and prices are going to slowly fall.

Let me pluck some figures from the air – I’d say it’s more likely to be six million over 2010/2011 and 14 million over 2012/2013. And I suspect that I’m being conservative.

Thanks.