29 million dedicated e-book readers predicted to ship in 2013: Hype or credible forecast?

Comments:

• Felix Torres says:

  August 19, 2009 at 7:41 am

  Very interesting article despite the misleading title.
  They do understand that books are, in fact, very different from music and video, so that lends some credibility to their analysis.
  Me, I suspect they may–as is typical for emerging technologies–be overly-optimistic in the short-term and overly pesimistic in the longer term.
  The way I see it:
  1- the market for “fiction-readers”, the market targetted by Sony and the K2, plus Bookeen, the Hanlin re-sellers, etc, is a good start but it will start to level-out fairly soon. Say in another two years.
  2- I am generally skeptical of newspapers and magazines as *drivers* for eReader sales, in the near term, even with subsidized hardware. Too much of the ptential market is going to be cannibalized by cellphones and computer-based reading.
  3- The textbook market will be *huge* but I can’t see it arriving until the second half of the decade. Mostly because educational bureaucracies are generally conservative; we’ll see a few universities start to ramp up in the next five years but the real money is in k-12 and that market isn’t opening up soon; the tech just isn’t there yet. (Flexible color displays with animation for starters.)

  So yes, I think 23 million by ’13 is too high by about a third. Ten million, though, I can see. 25 million by 2015, possible. 100 million by 2020? Likely. (Possibly pesimistic, though, if anybody ever gets the K-12 readers down to under $100 list.)

  Just need to remember that PCs sell 270 million-plus *per year*. Given time, eReaders should be able to do at least ten percent of that.
• Felix Torres says:

  August 19, 2009 at 7:44 am

  Of course, typos aside, if I think 23 million is too much, 29 is even less likely…