Okay, I’m calling this. I don’t know what’s happening with the e-reader market, but I’m 100% sure there are too many participants. Has this ever happened before with emerging tech? Were there fifty different MP3 players before Apple begat the iPod?
Today’s entrant is none other than Creative, known to long-time PC aficionados for their sound technology, and more recently sundry miscellaneous gadgets. Their impending e-reader is called the Mediabook, and unlike the kindle it:
will harness “videos, pictures, text, and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience.”
Which means it won’t be a dedicated e-reader, but some sort of hyrbrid iPhone-ish-netbook-like hand-held computer gizmo. But isn’t this really inevitable? Just as all SUV’s invariably morph into egg-shaped station wagons when gas mileage becomes an issue, all task-specific devices like the Kindle are going to keep drifting back to the hand-held computer model where all-in-one functionality is critical.
The biggest concern I have is that all of these developers are going to blow it. They’re going to go feature crazy and forget that the race to develop a digital book on par with an actual book has not been won — not even close. If that happens, gadget sales go up, e-book sales go flat or down, and everybody forgets (again) that text is still a big deal in the entertainment business. And education business. And newspaper business.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who runs the local service station is putting together his own e-reader, to be given away with every full tank. And I hear the Girl Scouts are going to be selling one along with their cookies. Can Nintendo be far behind? What about PlaySkool? And where is Boeing on this? If you can build a 7X7, can’t you build an e-reader?
— Mark Barrett
It occurs to me that this has happened for a variety of reasons.
1) The technology to create an ereading device exists and has existed for some time
2) The demand for ereaders seems to exist so a producer of ereaders must suspect a large latent demand
3) The few large scale releases of ereaders (Amazon, Sony, Coolr, Nook) have seen high demand among customers and had success.
4) Having seen the changes to other entertainment and content industries, some entrepreneurs suspect books and writing are subject to exactly the same pressures and are held by by established layers refusing to embrace change (this is made a more attractive suggestion by the fact that the companies that make up the established players appear to be such paragons of slow moving corporate behemoths!)
5) People read A LOT online these days seem to equal they like online reading!
6) Nobody want’s be to lose the market like the music industry did to Apple
But not all of these facts support the idea that there is a market for an ereader of substantial size. What has happened is that the market has achieved a very quick level of maturity in some ways, the fear of being caught has developed beyond the market. It is, a bubble as some people have been saying for a while. There are hundreds of MP3 units out there now because people are hoping to take some of the massive market Apple has yoinked. They are just trying to get ahead of the curve with ereaders.
I wouldn’t argue with any of your points. I don’t know if the e-reader market is huge and barely tapped, or already oversupplied with devices — I just get the feeling nobody else knows either. And I don’t really fault anyone for trying to grab market share before the market share is gone, as you also point out.
I do still insist, however (not that you argued differently) that e-readers have to become more transparent as devices. More gadgets and functionality are not going to win the day. It’s the ability of an e-reader to provide the same kind of experience that a book delivers that matters. (Or at least matters to me.)