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My prediction is based quite simply on the failure of e-readers to do what any lap/net/book/tablet can do, which is make everything on the net readable. Instead of dedicating themselves to that task, the e-readers have squandered development energy and money by trying to become netbooks/tablets. They will not succeed. Netbooks/tablets will become ereaders long before that happens, if it ever does, and it serves the e-reader industry right. They should have limited themselves to producing simple, cheap devices that would allow you to transfer a few gigs of text from the computer screen and take it to bed (and elsewhere) with you. They do NOT do that now, and the limited functions they do perform now are trouble-filled and unreliable. The comparison is very simple: 1) What do you have to do to get text on your computer screen? 2) What do you have to do to get the same text on your e-reader? It is illogical to expect the development to go from 2) to 1). In short, tablets or netbooks (better yet, tablets with detachable keyboards, which is perfectly possible and no doubt already exists) will get smaller, cheaper, more readable (e-ink or the equivalent), and more energy-efficient long before e-readers manage to tool up to the equivalent of what netbooks/tablets already do. I doubt that I will buy another e-reader. I'll wait for the Android tablets or Chrome netbooks. Just consider Google books, gutenberg.org, public libraries, PDFS, without even taking into account all the other stuff computers can do. All of these present no problem for netbooks/tablets but huge problems for e-readers, which they might have been able to solve if they had concentrated on that instead of trying to become little computers (touch screens, color, WIFI etc.). "All" computers have to do is get smaller and cheaper, which is the inevitable progression in any case.
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