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Will Tablets Kill Off e-Readers?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Are e-readers doomed? A research note earlier this week from IHS iSuppli suggested that, after years of solid growth, the e-book reader market was 'on an alarmingly precipitous decline' thanks to the rise of tablets. The firm suggested that e-reader sales had declined from 23.2 million units in 2011 to 14.9 million this year — around 36 percent, in other words. The note blames tablets: 'Single-task devices like the ebook are being replaced without remorse in the lives of consumers by their multifunction equivalents, in this case by media tablets.' Even Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the reigning champs of the e-reader marketplace, have increasingly embraced full-color tablets as the best medium for selling their digital products. Backed by enormous cloud-based libraries that offer far more than just e-books, these devices are altogether more versatile than grayscale e-readers, provided their users want to do more than just read plain text."
The only reason I bought a Kindle is that I can't stare at a backlit tablet for hours on end.
Isn't it also reasonable to suppose that eReaders are on the decline because all the people most likely to buy them have already bought them?
There is no question: anyone who spends more than a few minutes/day reading will agree reading books on LCD is really tiring. That is why I love my e-book reader, I can read for hours and my eyes won't get tired. Before it, I used to read on LCD, and after about 20 minutes my eyes would start bothering me.
On the other hand, I don't think most people read enough to be bothered by it, which is sad in many different levels. But hardcore readers won't give up their e-readers for LCD. Too bad we are a minority.
morcego
A multimedia tablet with an eink capable covering would be the best of both worlds.
I have a couple of both.
You're right, an e-reader of the simple sort is better than a tablet for reading in a number of ways. Epaper (are we still calling it that?) is easier to read, assuming you have a light source in or near the reader. Managing the device is obviously simple... updates are pretty rare. Battery life far exceeds a tablet. They're usually much more compact. They're simple to operate and they're less expensive.
That said, I rarely use mine anymore. It's just simpler to carry around the tablet that will do whatever I want. And they've come down in price now so much that some are pretty competitively priced, compared to an ereader.
So yeah, I think tablets will all but kill the reader market. As with most tech the readers won't go away entirely. At least not for a good, long while.
That's a good example as to how eink is pricing itself out of a market. It's taken years of being difficult to get hold of a non-kindle eink device and now LCD tablets have taken the niche that could have been filled with cheap eink devices four or five years ago.