E-Readers and E-Books: The New Bestsellers

Here's an article I saw over at The Philippine Star: E-Readers and E-Books: The New Bestsellers. An excerpt:

E-readers filled with hundreds of downloaded e-books are expected to be one of the bestselling gifts this Christmas, primarily in the United States and other developed countries where these new tech wonders are available.

Unfortunately for serious book lovers from other parts of the world, including the Philippines, e-readers won’t fill their Christmas stockings this year and they have to be contented for now reading e-books on their notebook computers or iPhones.

An e-reader is easy to use just like an MP3 player and a good companion during long travel and commutes. The e-books can be easily transferred to an e-reader using a high-speed USB connection hooked up to a PC or Mac.

As for the e-books, hundreds, if not thousands, can be crammed into an e-reader and they can be downloaded from the websites of leading bookstores at less cost than a real book or for free from selected websites or from local public libraries.

E-readers are still quite pricey at $200+. Market researchers believe it will gain mass appeal if e-readers get to the $50 price range, otherwise it won’t be as ubiquitous as MP3 players. With notebooks and smartphones offering alternative platforms for e-books, industry pundits see only about 10 million people owning e-readers by the end of 2010, or one percent of the 110 million who have MP3 players.

But with color screen e-readers in the pipeline and as the consumer electronics sector sees a bit ofrecovery from the recession, hopefully, the number can still go past 10 million.

Meanwhile, an e-book today sells at an average price of $8.30 versus $14.55 for a hardcover version. In the case of Amazon, e-books have a fixed price of $9.99.

The Association of American Publishers estimates that sales of e-books jumped 68.4 percent in 2008 and further increased to 177 percent to $96.6 million in August 2009.

Looking at the bigger picture, the association noted that e-books account for only 1.5 percent of the $6.8 billion books sales of 2009. However, they don’t discredit the fact that e-books’ growth rate is outpacing hardcover sales.