Think ‘09 was a banner year for e-book gizmos? You ain’t seen nothin’ compared to 2010, says Gartner analyst
This is old news to e-bookers aware of the rise of the e-book-capable iPhone, the Kindle and the forthcoming avalanche of new models such as the Nook. But it’s new news in the sense that Gartner Research is so influential in executive suites.
Gartner predicts “an e-reader mania” in the 2010 holiday season. Smartly, the company’s Allen Weiner plays up the potential of multi-purpose readers.
Meanwhile the good news continues this year. September e-book sales stats from the IDPF showed a 171 percent increase, and quarterly numbers look great, too. So far, $23 million in Random House’s revenue from The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown, has come from have e-books, according to Crain’s and the Bookseller—or five percent of the book’s total sales. Imagine what could happen without the format mess and DRM getting in the way.
(Via Softpedia and Personanondata.)
November 23rd, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Just for the record, it should be noted that this is the same Gartner who in 2006 predicted the demise of Apple and suggested they’d be better off getting out of the hardware business, and licensing their products to Dell:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39284186,00.htm
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Hmm – not a very good track record for an analyst! About the only thing that might happen is that once the market is saturated (like MP3 players) sales start to slow down as the only sales are to replace breakages etc. That doesn’t mean they aren’t popular, just that there won’t be a lot of new user sales.
Another strange marketing ploy – why did the Kindle take so long to get to Europe and Australia? Both places have a high rate of book reading, probably higher than anywhere else. There are almost no book readers available in Australia, where people read a lot of books and love any techno-gadget available. Was it just a lot stricter laws? Apple had this problem with the I-Phone being so closely tied to one ISP; it had to open up to more competition.
November 24th, 2009 at 5:44 am
That chart from IDPF irritates the hell out of me every time this story is updated. The smooth line they have fitted to it is completely inappropriate. They’ve chosen a mathematical function that decreases at the start, goes below zero for five quarters before finally curving up! I can understand the desire to smooth out some seasonal fluctuation but their approach is inappropriate. Time to hire someone with basic mathematical ability.