Hasta La Gadget!

E-readers are far from dead but many are certainly gasping for breath. A shake-out in the e-reader market has put some smaller companies out of business, leaving the playing field clear for giants like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony.

The list of e-reader makers running into trouble has grown in the past few weeks:

• Audiovox has canceled plans to introduce the RCA Lexi e-reader that it demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show this year.
• Last month, e-reader maker iRex filed for bankruptcy, citing disappointing sales of its product in the United States.
• Plastic Logic, which also debuted its large screen reader at CES in January, has canceled all pre-orders for its device and scrapped plans to ship the product.
• Cool-er, one of the earliest startups to launch a Sony look-alike e-reader, has listed all its products as “out of the stock” in the United States with no mention of when new devices will be available.

“Companies that had neither brand nor distribution have failed,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst for Forrester Research.

Price cuts by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, coupled with the shift in consumer interest toward more multi-purpose tablets, have also taken their toll on e-readers.

“You are seeing the same kind of proliferation and excitement in tablets now that you saw two years ago for e-readers,” says Epps.

After Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, e-readers became one of the hottest consumer products. The category attracted large companies such as Samsung and Barnes & Noble, even as lesser-known players such as Plastic Logic, Aluratek and iRiver jumped in.

Mostly Kindle clones, many of these e-readers were near-identical in how they looked and the features they offered. Almost all sourced their black-and-white screen from a single company: E Ink.

Meanwhile, Apple launched its iPad this year. At $500, it’s pricier than most e-readers, but offers relatively long battery life, a color screen and iBooks, an iTunes-like store for digital books. It may not be as ideally suited to reading as a dedicated e-reader, but many iPad customers are finding that it works well enough as a book reader, in addition to its many other functions.

Apple’s move sparked a price war in the e-reader market. Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle 2 to $190 from $260. Barnes & Noble released a Wi-Fi-only version of the Nook for $150, while a Nook with Wi-Fi and 3G capability now costs $200.

The price war put a squeeze on smaller e-reader manufacturers.

“As a result of the recent price drops in the market, our primary focus has shifted to international opportunities,” Audiovox told the Digital Reader website.

All this doesn’t mean consumers have completely fallen out of love with e-readers, says Epps. Tablets will outpace e-readers in overall sales, she says, but the shift toward digital books is here to stay. Forrester estimates 6.6 million e-readers will be sold in the United States this year. Approximately 29.4 million e-readers may be sold in the United States by 2016, compared to 59 million tablets.

Earlier this week, Amazon said for the first time sales of e-books are outstripping hardcovers. In June, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers. In the first six months of the year, the company sold three times as many e-books as it did in the first half of 2009.

“In the e-reader market, price is coming way down and that’s the major consideration for purchase,” says Epps. “If a company can do cheaper and better devices than Amazon, Sony or Barnes & Noble, they still have a chance — but no one’s been able to do that yet.”

See Also:

• E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Plastic Logic Que E-Reader Turns Into Vaporware
• Gallery: E-Readers Push Boundaries of Books
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers

Photo:Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Continue reading ExoPC nabs improved screen and e-book app, still on track for a September release (video)

ExoPC nabs improved screen and e-book app, still on track for a September release (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re being told that Verizon has a pair of devices that it’s identifying as “e-readers” on the roadmap for September of this year, but what’s really interesting is that they’re called “Entourage.” It’s possible there’s no association to the company of the same name, but we’re kind of thinking that the carrier has hooked up with the makers of the oddball Edge for these devices — especially since we know they both share an affinity for Android. We don’t know the specifics of the units other than the fact that they’ll be 7- and 10-inch tablets — presumably sans the Edge’s crazy dual-display design, though we can’t say for sure. Verizon has yet to play the e-reader game the same way Sprint and AT&T have with the Kindle and Nook — and of course, we’ve no doubt they’d love a viable iPad competitor. Who’s buying?

[Thanks, RBF]

Verizon getting two e-readers / tablets from Entourage in September? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When it comes to boring ‘ol text and images, there are plenty of formats that modern e-readers can manage — your EPUBs and OPFs and the like. But, when it comes to integrating multimedia content into a kind of next-gen e-book experience, the sort Wired is pushing on the iPad, things are rather less standardized. Sharp wants to be on the forefront of bringing that style of content together under a single standard: XMDF, or ever-eXtending Mobile Document Format. It enables video and animations and flashy presentation to be mingled in with the text, surely with the intent of distracting you from actually having to read anything. Of course, XHTML can manage all this stuff too, but it never was particularly great at the sort of precision text layout publishers crave, and presumably that’s also being addressed here. Naturally we’re a little more excited about hardware, and Sharp showed off two prototype readers measuring 5.5- and 10.8-inches respectively… though it didn’t have much to say about them otherwise. More details later this year, supposedly.

Sharp’s XMDF format looks to bring e-books into the next generation originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can’t decide if this is a Smart idea or a Stupid idea in the grand scheme of things, but we love it just the same. Humane PC and its Humane Reader child are open source hardware projects with some seriously low-cost internal components. At volume the PC could retail for as low as $20, and that’s with 2GB of microSD storage, USB / PS/2 plugs, and video out. The PC is primarily designed to output low-res, black and white text to a TV, making it a low cost reader for developing countries, and the Humane Reader project pre-loads the device with thousands of Wikipedia articles (much in the vein of the OpenMoko WikiReader). Of course, the Humane PC itself is imminently hackable, and we probably haven’t seen the full extent of this sucker’s functionality just yet. The project is currently seeking a partner to deploy some prototypes.

Humane Reader is a $20 8-bit PC for TVs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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