According to a recent report from the Yankee Group e-Readers are set to dramatically soar from 11 million units sold in 2010, making around $1.9 billion industry wide to 72 million units sold and a market growth of $8.2 billion by 2014.
The recent report estimates that the market will almost double every year until 2014 with popular electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle, and Barnes and Noble Nook paving the way with dramatic sales.
Device sales for 2010 mainly transpired in North America with a 54% of total sales occurring here, while greater presence exists within the Asian-Pacific Rim.
“Falling prices, growing content libraries and color e-paper displays will persuade consumers around the world to snap up e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle. Consumers in China and India will be responsible for a growing proportion of worldwide sales as Asia-Pacific’s middle class continues to grow.” said Yankee Group analyst Dmitriy Molchanov.
Some of the contributing factors to stimulate sales is a greater price reduction in the long term. In 2010 the Amazon Kindle price point fell three times. Its entry model only costing $139, while competing products such as the Kobo, Nook and others are around the same price. Industry analysts predict entry level e-readeres will fall further to around $100 in the long term and say growth will be arbitrated to e-Ink Triton technology which is evident in the new Hanvon Color e-Reader.
Another huge factor to stimulate the growth of the electronic reader market is the growing library of books available. Ebook Stores are constantly adding new books, while Project Gutenburg are amassing a treasure-trove of classic public domain books. Paid bookstores such as Amazon have hundreds of thousands of books available, while Kobo has a million.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
