Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
There's also the fact that the market is saturated. eReaders are not something most people buy every other year. Besides, a lot of people who like eReaders a lot (like me) tend to buy them for people who don't — and those eReaders end up at thrift stores. Which further saturates the market. I remember when Best Buy sold Kobos, Kindles and Nooks (maybe Sony readers) and Target sold Kindles, Nooks and Sony readers. Also, Staples and Office Depot used to stock both Kindles and Nooks.
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It also doesn't help that there was a big faddish spike in sales (leading to a ton of non-used readers) back in 2012 after the shift to near cost pricing.
That distorted the sales curve data so it doesn't reflect the actual adoption curve of the tech. In fact, B&N's Nook problems owe a lot of misreading the market and thinking spike sales were representative of adoption and usage. They ended up doing BOGO sales and giving away STRs and selling them at liquidation prices for years. (Post-spike sales showed a decline from peak even as the tech was booming with readers and ebook share of sales doubled.)
And those that did get used are still being used.
They still work even with recent releases.
The failure of ePub 3 to displace epub2.x even removed obsolescence as a sales driver for that breed, while Amazon still offers classic mobi downloads.
It's a classic case of "if it ain't broke..."