Let’s take a look at snippets of a Forrester Report, a full Wattpad report and figure out what trends we’re seeing -
- Forrester has released a report on the eReader Market. The price ($1999) rules out all of us getting our hands on it so we’ll get by on an excellent summary by ReadWriteWeb and the charts revealed.
- Wattpad have released a global metrics report (and have a summary on their blog). Wattpad have a global Alexa rank of 15,492, and they claim 3.1 million app downloads, so its a pretty decent sized audience we’re talking about.
Trends Forrester is forecasting
Its worth nothing that Forrester were completely wrong on the Kindle the first time around (they admit as such). How do they do this time?
- First let’s look at their chart -
Forrester forecasts the ebook, ereader market
- Forrester say that adoption of the Kindle DX for textbooks will be slow and won’t take off until 2011 and beyond. From my perspective, a June 10th release of the Kindle DX gives it a lot of time before 2011 to hit wide scale adoption. My prediction is that its going to become popular much before 2011.
- Forrester totally mess up on the prediction that color will be available early 2011 and that video will be available towards end 2011. Here’s Pixel Qi’s 3qi screen showing video and color.
- Finally, it makes no sense that the rate of penetration goes down after the introduction of color and adoption by college students and business consumers. The graph literally shows adoption rate decline around the time eReaders hit the $99 price point.
Its unfortunate that while this blog has been blogging about Pixel Qi and how it might revolutionize ereaders since Feb 4th, 2009, Forrester is publishing a $1,999 report in June that doesn’t take them into account at all.
Trends Wattpad is actually seeing
Wattpad stand on much firmer ground as they’ve released mobile ebook usage data that they’ve been gathering. Its unfortunate they use a url shortening service and throw away all the link juice they’d get off of the links to their report.
Anyways, here are the highlights that were interesting to me -
- iPhone dominates US mobile ebook usage. Not surprising as iPhone dominates US mobile web usage in general (66% according to AppleInsider).
- Nokia dominates worldwide.
- Blackberry usage grew over 400% since the launch of Blackberry App world.
There’s not really much in the PDF report. Its basically a glorified marketing hand-out.
Thoughts
Forrester ought to re-do their report to maintain some semblance of relevance. Now that they know about Pixel Qi’s color/video/3in1 screens and Google’s entry into ebooks perhaps they can write a report that isn’t a mockery of its $1,999 price tag.
Wattpad get credit for releasing their numbers. However they really ought to include trends and not just numbers. How has adoption of ebooks grown? What channels are growing fastest? How much are people spending?
Perhaps this is an area worth researching some more – what the real trends with ebooks are, and where the ereader market is going.
Filed under: kindle
Thanks for your feedback. This is our first report so it is hard to include market trends related data. We will definitely include more information in future Wattpad Global Ebook Metrics Reports.
I’m concerned that a reading device with too much multimedia would be distracting. When I read, I want the least amount of blinking eye-candy. I think this is one of the reasons it’s hard to read on a laptop. Apart from the screen itself, it’s too easy to get sidetracked by Twitter, email, YouTube, etc.
I too am interested in knowing the ebook trends such as how many people are now buying with the introduction of Kindle’s and such. I remember researching about ebooks just a few years ago and they had a stigma around it and now today they may be on the rise. I want to know if they are infact on a rise and will people with the introduction of e-readers be buying / downloading more ebook titles soon.
This brings excitement to people like me whom have had a manuscript sitting in my drawer for years because of the lack of avenues for it to be publiched. Creating a ebook is so simple and with instant delivery a plus in my situation. All of them book idea’s I had years ago is a possibility to become a reality now with the ease of creating a ebook.
I hope that e-readers and ebooks do become more widespread and that every person with a cell phone could download a ebook and read it right then. I think with the explosion of technology even with xbox360 and facebook this is a possibility.
I sure do hope so!!