By Chris Cook, Deputy Editor, PPI Pulp & Paper Week, RISI
"US consumers are making an inexorable transition to an all-digital, Internet-powered world," said Forrester Research principal analyst Charles Golvin. "While today these digital activities are constrained to the home and the office, in the next several years consumers will increasingly rely on a ubiquitous Net that is instantaneously accessible on a wide variety of devices."
But mass-market adoption of digital-book readers may be unobtainable unless companies making them lower their prices, says the study's author, Sarah Rotman Epps.
Instead, consumer adoption will likely resemble digital cameras -- which took 10 years to reach 50 million US consumers -- rather than MP3 players, which already have 110 million owners, she believes.
Changed behavior. Like digital cameras, e-readers could change consumer behavior, making broad sections of the population adopt reading from digital screens in lieu of paper. But for that to happen, Epps says consumers will need education campaigns like Sony's "Reader Revolution" as well as lower prices.
According to the report, current e-readers priced at $199 and up will have an estimated market of 25 million. Forrester forecasts that "2 million US consumers will buy an e-reader in 2009, raising total ownership to 3 million, or 12% of the maximum addressable market at the $199 price point."
Crowded market. The e-reader device market is becoming increasingly crowded, with the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader and Plastic Logic Reader already on the market and several more planned -- among them devices directly targeting newspaper and magazine readers.
One that could prove to be a game-changer is a model planned by netbook inventor Asus, which will feature two screens and a booklike spine, more exactly mimicking the look and feel of a book.
A new textbook. According to the The Times of London newspaper, the Asus e-reader will have full color screens, instead of the mono-color ones its competitors use, and feature touch-screens and online connectivity allowing users to pull up a web page or supplemental information, making it a natural educational tool.
While frequent book readers drive device and content sales today, the next five years will see an explosion of the eReader textbook market, Forrester says, and in 10 years, the market will be driven by businesses going green in government, education, health, and other sectors.
