If You Want to Meet a Girl, Don’t Get a Dog, Get an Ereader
That’s the last line of a Washington Post feature article dissecting the state of the ebook industry, including ereaders, the Kindle effect, and of course wooing a girl using an ebook reader.
The article raises some good point and it convinced me to finally order the Kindle while awaiting for Asus to release its Eee Reader. On the sales of electronic books
- Ebooks sales plummet to around $96.8 million starting this year up to August 2009
- The figure does not include ebooks that were downloaded freely at public libraries
- Overall, sales of ebooks account for a mere 1.5% of the publishing industry’s $6.8 billion this year
On ebook readers, ereaders
- around 1.2 million e-readers are predicted to be sold until the end of the year, thanks to the Nook, Sony PRS eReader, Amazon Kindle and other ereaders
- 10 million people are expected to own an ereader by the end of 2010
The article also include a look into the demographics of the ereader market, ebook pricing and its effect on publishers.
Read the article and tell me – are you ready for the future of books and book reading?
If You Want to Meet a Girl, Don’t Get a Dog, Get an Ereader
Here in Australia we are still waiting for a selection of e readers – only just trickling in to the country. But once they start arriving I am sure it will be a big market.
They need to be cheaper, but remember how expensive MP3 players were at the start. Also mobile phones, even CD players.
E books won’t replace p books overnight, they are not quite like CD’s or records as they have a more emotional attachment and can be a luxury item. Perhaps we will see more high-end books, leather binding etc as they become a “collector’s item” rather than a utilitarian text book or throw-away paperback novel. But they will go – perhaps to the eternal relief of lots of trees!
Thanks for the insights Carol. The situation is similar in the Philippines, where I am right now. It’s a good thing online shopping sites have gone international allowing us to order gadgets and get them ship to our country.
In fact, I haven’t seen a single ebook reader being sold in most local tech shops. I agree, it may not replace printed books outright, but don’t you think it should, given the current state of the environment?