[Nathanael]

Dissecting press releases is an exercise in frustration, so I won't even bother. Amazon claims 80%; Apple claims 22%; B&N claims 20%; and Sony's in there somewhere, as well. Either someone is lying and getting away with it, or the SEC isn't bothering.

Bottom line is the Kindle is a very big fish swimming in a very small pond.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Amazon selling as many Kindles in the first 70-odd days of 4Q of 2010 as they sold in 2009.

Which, according to Businessweek, was 2.4 million. Looking back at the IDC study you referenced earlier, Apple is expected to sell in excess of 100 million iPads over the next two years. Steve Jobs could toss back 2.4 million Kindles with his breakfast marguerita and still have room left over for the olive.

As to whether tablets are impacting the ereader market, I won't even pretend to know, and, given that the iPad's been out less than a year, I think anyone who does is selling something. Nevertheless, I decided to crunch the IDC numbers just to see where they lead. Here's what I came up with (YMMV). Note the IDC numbers in your link didn't provide 2009 figures, so I inferred them from its Q3 2010 figure.

Worldwide ereader sales in millions:

2009 7.6
2010 10.8
2011 14.7
2012 16.6

That's a 42% Y/Y growth rate in 2010, 36% in 2011, and 13% in 2012. There certainly seems to be a significant slowdown, though, as I said, I won't even pretend to know whether its coincidence with the advent of the tablet really is just a coincidence.

In raw numbers, that's a hair under 50 million ereaders in 4 years, vs. 140 million tablets in less than 3. Giving half the ereader sales to Amazon (IDC estimates the Kindle at 42% of the 2010 market) and 75% of the tablets to Apple, then iPad has outsold Kindle better than 4-to-1 despite the Kindle's 15-month head start.

The rest of our discussion simply boils down to our disparate opinions about how significant an ereading platform the iPad will turn out to be.

Then again, I also stumbled across Nick Hampshire over at mediaIDEAS predicting the worldwide ereader market would hit 25 billion by 2020. Of course, that was before the iPad hit the market; wonder what he'd say now.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I'm not buying the e-readers-are-doomed-argument yet.

Nor am I preaching it (yet). The dedicated ereader will be around for a while yet, I suspect, though prices will have to keep dropping to keep them viable. They may well become a commodity item.

However, as a significant driver of ebook and ereading trends, I do think their best days will soon be behind them.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Certainly the iPad has not meaningfully harmed Kindle sales yet

I haven't been able to find anything significant on this; the closest I've been able to come is a widely reported ChangeWave survey (see Kindle Rapidly Losing Share To IPad), but that came out before Christmas, and was based on survey results rather than number crunching, and includes newspapers, magazines and blogs in its definition of ereading; however, it has some interesting charts.

There was also an even older rather generalized Garnter prediction that "media tablets"" would eat into e-reader sales, among other devices. That report had even rosier numbers for the tablet market than the IDC prediction (154 million in 2013).

But don't forget that Amazon is out to dominant the ebook, not the ereader, market. Once the iPad surpasses the Kindle as Amazon's primary delivery channel, it'll be interesting to watch Bezos' response.

Feel free to revisit this thread in a year to see how far off the mark I am.

--Nathanael