Will Tablets Kill Off e-Readers?

[wraggster]

Are e-readers doomed? A research note earlier this week from IHS iSuppli suggested that, after years of solid growth, the e-book reader market was 'on an alarmingly precipitous decline' thanks to the rise of tablets (http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/will-tablets-kill-off-e-readers/). The firm suggested that e-reader sales had declined from 23.2 million units in 2011 to 14.9 million this year (http://www.isuppli.com/Home-and-Consumer-Electronics/MarketWatch/Pages/Ebook-Readers-Device-to-Go-the-Way-of-Dinosaurs.aspx) — around 36 percent, in other words. The note blames tablets: 'Single-task devices like the ebook are being replaced without remorse in the lives of consumers by their multifunction equivalents, in this case by media tablets.' Even Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the reigning champs of the e-reader marketplace, have increasingly embraced full-color tablets as the best medium for selling their digital products. Backed by enormous cloud-based libraries that offer far more than just e-books, these devices are altogether more versatile than grayscale e-readers, provided their users want to do more than just read plain text."

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/14/216259/will-tablets-kill-off-e-readers