Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

Let’s take a look at snippets of a Forrester Report, a full Wattpad report and figure out what trends we’re seeing -

1. 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.
2. 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?

1. First let’s look at their chart -  
   

   Forrester forecasts the ebook, ereader market

2. 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. 
3. 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.
4. 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 -

1. iPhone dominates US mobile ebook usage. Not surprising as iPhone dominates US mobile web usage in general (66% according to AppleInsider).
2. Nokia dominates worldwide.
3. 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.