Is 2010 the year of the E-book?

 

Over the last few years publishers, authors and e-book makers have waited with bated breath to see whether or not e-books would reach a wide enough market to justify all out e-book sales. And, it seems as if they may have another year to wait before e-book readers top the list of Christmas Lists. Arguably, e-books are still in the early stages of the adoption cycle, and unlike other products/services, may only reach mass market for certain genres. For example, there may be a preference amongst consumers to buy quick read non-fiction e-books versus a large chemistry textbook which would take up a great deal of memory space. What we do know is there is a lot to learn about e-books and their adoption into mainstream consumerism. So, we decided to get back to basics and look at where exactly e-books stand in today's current market.

 

Readers

 

The adoption cycle is how quickly a product is well, adopted, into mainstream consumerism. If you look at the graph below you will see the various stages of adoption.

 

 

Innovators, are consumers who have to have the latest gadget and don't mind paying top dollar for a product or service. When you think back to the first e-book reader you saw online, or in a store, innovators already had the product in hand and probably paid full price. Early adopters also like to have the latest gadget, but wait until the price drops. So, we would say that e-book readers are moving towards, or are in the early majority stage of the adoption cycle, and it may take another year to get the majority of bookworms interested in e-books versus a paperback.

But, will the majority of people warm up to e-books?

We have spoken to a few innovators and early adopters who buy e-books. Those who buy regularly only buy e-books which they will only read once, a "throw away" book (if you don't mind us saying). What we mean by this is that they are looking for a quick read, versus a business book, that they may keep for many years and reference because it is career related.

Towards the start of the Christmas season, we saw commercials touting e-book readers, and we all thought, "well, this may be the year", but we just haven't seen the sales (or hype on a mass level). Some retailers say they have sold out of readers, but won't provide sales figures: in other words, we could produce 5 e-book readers, sell them all, and tout the product as being sold out. So, to date, we do not know how many readers are in the hands of consumers:  5 or 5,000,000 (and yes, we know it's more than 5).

Even publishers aren't sure about e-books: many have held off releasing e-book versions of their bestselling novels.

 

Publisher and Authors

 

E-books and readers are in the innovative/early growth stages of a product life cycle (graph shown below). Although many individual authors are choosing to publish e-books, in comparison to the number of physical books published, they still have a long way to go. Publishers are still unsure about the mass market appeal of e-books, and whether or not they will cannibalize or help sales of their paperbacks. So, in some ways, the types of e-books available are limited for consumers as publishers aren't quite as sure about the sales potential, and in the meantime, independent authors are flooding the market quickly.

 

 

Just to give you an idea, every product life cycle is different, we can be talking about a product reaching a state of decline in 1 year, or 100 years, or never. Some products are slower to reach the growth and maturity stage.  We are just saying that the e-book market is fairly new, and is being closely watched by a lot of publisher and authors before they decide to jump in.