E-Reader Companies Must Look Past The Book

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
By Ross Rubin, Executive Director, Industry Analysis

To butcher the universal application of an old cliché regarding books and their covers, don’t judge an electronic book market’s profitability by its hardware. The industry has been obsessed with guessing the number of Kindles Amazon has sold, but that doesn’t tell the whole story of the device’s success. Since the Kindle is a $300 vending machine for Amazon, it can be a sustainable venture for the e-tailer even if it never cracks the mass market or achieves market share dominance.
 
The Kindle’s favorable economics have obvious appeal to Amazon’s longtime rival Barnes & Noble, which announced recently that it would be partnering with Plastic Logic, deeply in need of a content partner, to launch its own connected electronic bookstore utilizing AT&T’s network.

Is the e-reader opportunity limited, then, to the avid affluent bestseller reader scooping up Kindles and Sony Readers? No. According to a forthcoming NPD study on e-readers, other kinds of printed publications are more in demand from consumers than books. Magazines, for example, elicited the highest percentage of responses for desired materials. Indeed a significant percentage of consumers expressed that they wanted color support in their e-readers (albeit not as many as those who favored wireless Internet access offered by the Kindle or a touchscreen offered by the Sony Reader). Magazines make sense as an e-reader content source because, while they are easier to digest and often more timely than books, they have not been commoditized as a content source by the Web.

We’ll be releasing more details on the report soon, including information on what was far and away the most cited reason as to why consumers were not interested in these kinds of devices.

1 Comment

Other Links to this Post

1. IREX Helps Barnes & Noble Accelerate E-Book Competition | DisplaySearch Blog — September 25, 2009 @ 11:08 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment