[ekaser]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Perhaps, but that also depends on how we define that "market share."

I'm trying NOT to play semantic games by 'defining' things one way or another. I'm trying to look at the "big picture." You have to keep in mind that prices/costs are driven by market share: the more of something that is sold, the cheaper it can be sold, and the cheaper something is, the more of them that will be sold. Now, I'm sure your argument will be that eInk machines will inherently always be cheaper than fast color multi-function devices, but if that's so, why don't we still have monochrome word-processing machines in all of our offices? It's because the added functionality and flexibility of fexible color computers so FAR out-weighs the savings in cost, that the market for those b&w word processors dried up to the point at which it was unsustainable.

50% of the public buys 10 or fewer books per year; 24% buy 11-20 books per year; 14% buy more than 20 books per year.

Exactly. Thanks for proving my point. Current eInk readers are being supported by 14% or less of the population. The REST of the population still reads, and reads a tremendous amount, but it's newspapers, magazines, WEB SITES, etc, all of which benefit tremendously from faster, color machines. When more than 80% of the population wants fast color reading devices, where do you think the market is going to go?

Again, I am NOT saying the eInk devices (or some other "optimized for book reading" devices) will go away, or go away soon. I personally believe they WILL, but that's very much just-my-opinion. But I think it's pretty indefensible to claim that eInk/"optimized for book reading" devices will (or even should) retain a majority share of the market. It's just not going to happen.

(Even if these particular numbers are inaccurate, I have no doubt that there is a smaller group that reads far more than the majority.) Chances are that those who read, say, 15+ books per year will want a device that is made for reading, rather than made to watch movies, and that these users will be a major force in driving ebook revenues -- far more than the people who buy 5 or fewer books per year, for example.

Correct. Absolutely. (well, mostly...) But again, from the same data, we draw two VERY different conclusions. Yes, those who read 15+ books per year will want a device that is GOOD for reading (but that doesn't mean it WON'T be good for other things too... technology marches on). Just because something CAN play movies, too (and quite well) doesn't mean it can't display books in an excellent fashion, too. Maybe we don't have the technology today, January 1, 2010, but I think you're being very short-sighted if you think it will never happen (and likely sooner than later). And yes, those 15+/year book readers WILL be a major force in driving ebook revenues, but ebook revenues are a tiny (and rapidly shrinking) percentage of all 'media' consumed today and in the future. The market products are driven by the market demands, and yes, niche products can (and sometimes DO) survive, but the mainstream (ie, highest volume) products are inherently not niche products, and a 14% market share is NOT mainstream. And the actual market share for novel-reading-optimized devices, once fast, color, flexible, reasonably cheap devices become available will be far less than 14%, probably closer to 1% of the market. I bought pretty close to 15 books just last MONTH, but give me the choice between a gray-scale eInk-ish device that does nothing else, and a fast, color, flexible, reasonably priced device that also is good for reading novels, and I'm gone in an instant without looking back. And I have no particular desire to watch TV or movies on such a device. But I do want to do many other things on it. I'm not (and won't be) the only one.

Also, it doesn't quite make sense to say that ebook reading market share will be "eaten up" by multifunction devices, because this is not currently a zero-sum game...

You say to-may-toe, I say to-mah-to... I consider a device that drops from around 80 or 90% market share to less than 10% in a 10 year period to have been "eaten up". We can argue this until the next blue moon, perhaps, without changing anyone's mind, so let's come back in 10 years and see where the market is?

As to whether tablets specifically will flourish, I have my doubts. The current crop of tablets (i.e. laptops with touch screens) have some utility, but have hardly taken the market by storm. IMO that's much more about hype than interest by the general public, at least at the moment.

The hype is there because LOTS of people want those things. "The current crop" haven't taken the market by storm because the right combination of technology and design and marketing hasn't yet come along. But to claim that's evidence that it never WILL seems ...short-sighted. Look how long it's taken the e-book market to take off. People have been reading e-books for 20 years or more... in VERY small numbers. But it's only been in the past year or two that e-book READERS have taken off. The Amazon Kindle was not the first e-reader. But it was the one that triggered the sudden acceptance of e-readers and e-books by a large enough population to suddenly make the market sit up and take notice. When the right technology, design, pricing, marketing combination comes along with light-weight, fast, color, flexible readers/computers/slates/tablets/whatever-you-want-to-call-them, it's going to make the Kindle intro look like a blip in history, because suddenly 80-90% of the population is going to want one instead of 5-10%.

Too many of the arguments I'm reading here by the staunch defenders of eInk/novel-reading-specialized devices seem to assume that technology will not march onwards, that fast color displays with flexible operating systems will never be able to come anywhere close to the quality of reading experience of the current (or future) eInk displays. I've been around (yes, here's the "old geezer" argument) since before the days of LED digital watches, the ones with red readouts that required you to push a button to read the time because the LEDs would run the battery down in no time. They were succeeded by LCDs which were always on and lower power, and easy to read in the sun (the red LEDs were harder to read in direct sun). I've watched the birth of home computer kits with hex-LED readouts (and built my own), the explosion of "home computers", the intro of the Apple and IBM PC computers (with b&w monitors, then 4-color CGA, then 16-color EGA and 256-color VGA and on and on, and then LCDs...). Blah, blah, blah... after a while, you get a feeling for the technology market and how the mass of people behave in the market place and how the market place reacts to them. The future of (the majority of) the ereader market seems obvious to me.

But maybe I'm wrong. I was once before, when I thought I'd made a mistake...