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How Is The Ebook Reader Market Developing?

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Thamisgith | Jun 18, 2011 |

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Although the ebook reader market is still a relatively new phenomenon, it is starting to become established and seems to be an important part of the publishing landscape. Amazon has been one of the major influences in the development and growth of the market, but there are other major players as well.

The key players in the market today seem to be - in no particular order - Barnes and Noble, Apple and Amazon. Of course, there are others, but those three appear to be the driving forces right now.

Clearly, the two specialist ebook reader suppliers also have very well established links with books and reading. That could very well be a sign of things to come. It may prove to be increasingly difficult for pure electronics manufacturers to compete in future.

For example, Sony were one of the original ebook reader pioneers. Their PRS reader was a perfectly good device and actually launched in advance of the Kindle. However, since the Kindle appeared on the scene, Sony have been playing catch up and not even the launch of a whole series of, fairly innovative, readers has helped them to fully make up lost ground. The Sony touch screen reader was the first to appear on the market. They made it possible to borrow library books using Sony readers (Amazon are still thinking about this - it is planned for the Kindle sometime this year). However, they are just not at the races in the ebook reader stakes right now and the absence of an effective affiliation with books and reading looks to be a likely influencing issue.

If that theory is correct, then the newly enhanced Nook reader from Barnes and Noble must surely be considered to be a genuine threat to the dominance of the Kindle reader. It has a number of upgrades and improvements to the original Nook, including a touch screen e-ink technology display which negates the need for a QWERTY type keypad and allows the new Nook to be smaller and more portable.

Amazon in turn, are expected to launch their own tablet computer to compete directly with Apple's iPad. Amazon are said to have finalized an agreement with Quanta, a Taiwanese manufacturer who also produce goods for both Blackberry and Sony, for the manufacture of as many as 800,000 units a month.

It's widely predicted that the Amazon tablet will have a lower price than the tablet computers currently available on the market. Amazon are expected to achieve this by offsetting the cost of their hardware against future sales of goods from the Amazon website - in a similar manner to the recently launched "Kindle with Special Offers" which replaces pictures of famous authors on the screen saver pages with adverts.