By Sean Murphy

Ten years ago in the Emerging Market Update, CEA’s own Angela Titone wrote about a technology to keep an eye on. At that time, the product in question − e-books − anticipated being able to store up to 10 average-length novels, and ranged in price from $199 to $1,5000!

How times have changed.

While it has taken a decade for e-books to finally emerge as a force to be reckoned with, there are a variety of explanations for their relatively sluggish adaptation. For one thing, as Angela reported back in ’99, consumers hoped to have extra features such as e-mail and internet connectivity included in the optimal e-book design. Of course, in the ensuing years, we saw these advancements made in a variety of products. Initially, hand-held PDAs worked as electronic personal date planners; soon thereafter the proliferation of notebooks drove price points down resulting in steadily increased adoption. In recent years smartphones have combined the best aspects of portable media players and personal (portable) computers. In other words, not many people in 1999 could have predicted how quickly, and radically, the technological landscape would shift.

For this year’s edition of our Five Technology Trends To Watch, I endeavored to provide a contemporary assessment of the “evolution of content”, focusing on products we can expect to see ascending in the short-term. Going into this project, I was keenly aware that e-books are an increasingly ubiquitous topic of conversation (every day, it seems, we are reading new announcements regarding proposed upgrades, mergers and predictions), but I did not appreciate, initially, how dominant a presence e-books stand to become in the marketplace.

Source: CEA July 2009 Forecast

CEA expects sales of e-books to accelerate considerably over the next five years. Total unit shipments should reach almost 1.2 million by the end of 2009, representing a more than one hundred percent increase versus last year. Double-digit unit shipment growth is expected through 2013. The picture for total expected revenue is correspondingly bright: e-books look to generate $317 million by the end of 2009 (up over one hundred percent from 2008) and double-digit growth is anticipated over the next five years, culminating in over $21 billion in 2013.

The big story of 2008 was Amazon’s Kindle, which appeared to be on the verge of becoming the de-facto brand for e-books, just as iPods are now pretty well synonymous with MP3 players. The competition, watching (and studying) Amazon’s success, has begun to serve notice that Kindle will not automatically own the market. Sony’s e-book solution, the Sony Reader, has a competitive price point and has emerged as a viable alternative. Other models in various stages of development, such as Samsung’s Papyrus, and offerings from iRex Technologies, Astak and Acer, will make a concerted play in this space during the months and years ahead.

Read Part Two and Part Three of this Blog.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Consumer Research, Portable Electronics. Reply to this post, or trackback from your own site. Follow responses to this entry through the comments RSS feed.