Ten Predictions For The E-Reader/E-Book Market In 2010

Ten Predictions For The E-Reader/E-Book Market In 2010

This has been a breakout year for e-readers and e-books—device sales will have more than tripled by the end of this year, and content sales are up 176% for the year. But next year will be anything but boring. Here are Forrester’s predictions for 2010:

1. E Ink will lose its claim to near-100% market share for e-reader displays. Next year will see the first devices that are marketed as “e-readers” but that don’t exclusively use E Ink displays. Competition will come in three forms: 1) cheaper substitutions for E Ink that use the same electrophoretic display technology; 2) dual-screen devices that have both an E Ink and an LCD screen; and 3) devices that use an entirely different display technology, such as transflective LCD or OLED.

2. Dual-screen mobile phones and netbooks will eat into e-reader demand. Most consumers don’t read enough to justify buying a single-function reading device, and according to Forrester’s data, more consumers already read e-books on mobile phones and PCs than on e-readers. Consumer electronics manufacturers will tap into the growing digital reading trend by launching new versions of their devices with reading-optimized screens. Mobile phones like the Samsung Alias 2 already have secondary E Ink screens, which could be repurposed for reading rather than typing or time-telling. Netbooks will also launch with dual E Ink/LCD screens, like the Asus EEE PC prototype that debuted at CeBIT in 2009. Since some e-readers will launch with dual-screens, too, like the E Ink/LCD Entourage Edge, the main difference between these devices and dual-screen netbooks will be software and marketing.

3. Apps will make non-reading devices more e-book-friendly. E-readers like the Kindle have catalyzed demand for digital reading: e-books have been around for more than a decade, but no one bought them before Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) made it convenient to buy and consume them. But the market for e-books is not limited to e-readers. This year gave us oodles of apps for the iPhone (Gizmodo called e-books the new fart apps), the B&N app for smartphones and PCs, and the beginning of apps for portable gaming devices like the Sony (NYSE: SNE) PSP and Nintendo DS. Next year will see more e-book apps on more devices. These apps will make it easier to view reading content on non-reading-optimized devices, which will provide a “good enough” experience for the majority of consumers who don’t read enough to justify buying a single-function e-reader, and will provide multiplatform convenience for consumers who do own e-readers.

4. eReaders will get apps, too. As anyone with an iPhone knows, apps are where the magic happens: They make the device infinitely more useful. iRex Technologies, which has a B2B e-reader business in Europe and is launching its first consumer-targeted e-reader in the U.S. in December, will release an SDK (software development kit) so that software developers can make their own apps for the iRex DR800SG. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon launch a Kindle app store, too. What kind of apps, you say? We think anything from a social-reading app from Goodreads to an enterprise app from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) or Oracle would make e-readers vastly expand the possibilities for consumers and businesses.

5. Amazon will launch a suite of new touchscreen e-readers. Awkward Kindle keyboard, begone! We think 2010 will bring several entirely new e-readers from Amazon, featuring touchscreens, color (by the end of the year), and flexibility (e.g., displays that don’t require a glass backpane, so they’ll be less prone to breakage). These new devices will keep Amazon in the news and top-of-mind for consumers who are considering buying e-readers.

6. B&N will steal market share from Amazon and Sony. This year was a setup year for B&N, and 2010 will see its efforts start to pay off. In 2009, B&N acquired Fictionwise, launched its own eBookstore and reading app for mobile phones and PCs, announced partnerships with e-reader manufacturers Plastic Logic and iRex, and launched its own Nook e-reader (which it promptly sold out of). In 2010, B&N will rack up significant sales of Nooks and e-books, as some consumers look for an Amazon alternative. Sony will launch its own new devices, and will work on improving the software and book-buying experience. B&N will end up taking market share from both Amazon and Sony, but Amazon will retain its dominant position as market leader.

7. E-book content sales will top $500 million in the U.S. In the first three quarters of 2009 (through September), U.S. e-book content sales have more than doubled from a year ago: Wholesale revenues reported to the AAP for January through September 2009 top $109 million, compared with $52.4 million for all of 2008. And these numbers tell only part of the story: AAP data represents wholesale, not retail, revenue; what the retailer collects from the consumer could be more (or less) than what the retailer pays to the publisher. In addition, AAP data represents only a subset of trade e-book publishers, and it excludes major markets like education, libraries, and professional electronic sales. This means that AAP data, while directionally useful, far under-reports the true size of the e-book content market. Considering the growth rate of e-book trade sales (up 176% year-to-date), we think it’s reasonable to project overall e-book revenue will top $500 million in the U.S. in 2010.

8. E-textbooks will become more accessible, but sales will be modest. If you’re holding your breath waiting for the electronic textbook market to take off, slowly start exhaling, because it won’t happen in 2010. Despite the hullabaloo from Amazon about the Kindle DX, the device is a dud for textbooks. Students who have tested them at Northwestern and at Suffolk University that we’ve spoken to complain not just about shortcomings of the device, but more importantly, about the lack of content—they say they wouldn’t mind shelling out for a new device if they could get all their textbooks on it. In 2010, this isn’t likely to happen. Why? Publishers aren’t ready to relinquish control over how their content is sold and displayed. For example, the publisher-owned CourseSmart has a substantial content catalog for online subscription but isn’t available on portable devices other than iPhones, and won’t be available on new, textbook-optimized devices like the Entourage Edge because of the proprietary format and DRM that CourseSmart uses.

9. Magazine and newspaper publishers will launch their own apps and devices. Magazine and newspaper publishers aren’t satisfied with the way their content looks and acts on the Kindle and Sony Readers—they want color, video, interactivity, the ability to sell ads and control the subscriber relationship. Old media moves slowly, but in 2010 we’ll see them crawling towards some solutions. Time Inc.‘s John Squires is spearheading an effort to get other magazine publishers together in a joint venture, which would sell access to digital versions of their magazines that could be consumed on portable devices. The publishers hope this will give them more leverage with partners like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Amazon, and will help them develop standards around how to display magazine content and ads. On the device front, the Hearst-funded FirstPaper promises to launch a newspaper-optimized eReader (we’ve seen it, it’s nice), and will focus on helping publishers with the back-end processes of getting their content and ads onto multiple portable devices, not just its own.

10. China, India, Brazil, and the EU will propel global growth, but the U.S. will still be the biggest market. Right now, the U.S. is the biggest market for e-readers and e-books, and that won’t change in 2010. But the rest of the world will start to catch up. At least five new e-readers will launch in China (distributed through China Mobile), and two in India, which currently doesn’t have any homegrown products. Brazil has latent demand that some entrepreneurial company will tap into, and Europe, too, shows potential for e-book growth. According to a recent Forrester survey of 14,536 online consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, 4% of consumers in these countries reported having paid for e-books in the past month, and 19% said they’d be willing to pay for e-books in the future.

Have your own predictions? Post them here or tell us about them on Twitter @srepps and @jmcquivey.

Sarah Rotman Epps and James McQuivey are analysts at Forrester Research, where they serve, and contribute to the Forrester blog for Consumer Product Strategy professionals.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-ten-predictions-for-the-e-book-market-in-2010/

m.humo.be: persbericht

Die ochtend op uw gsm
Humo gaat mobiel

VIDEO DEMO : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnpM4w9A5RQ

Vandaag lanceert het weekblad Humo één van de allereerste Belgische multimediasites voor gsm's: m.humo.be, de mobiele tegenhanger van www.humo.be.

Mobiele websites staan aan de vooravond van de doorbraak. Ter illustratie: van de 200 miljoen gebruikers van de socialenetwerksite Facebook surfen er al meer dan 30 miljoen via hun gsm, en die groep is haast 50 procent actiever dan pc-gebruikers. Sites aangepast aan dit nieuwe medium, met de klemtoon op gebruiksgemak en toegankelijkheid, hebben de toekomst.

Met m.humo.be bedient Humo de lezer meer dan ooit op zijn wenken. Wie op koopjesjacht is, kan zich in drukke winkelcentra laten gidsen door Humo's muziek-, boeken-, film- en dvd-selectie. Wie op de valreep wil weten of er nog wat te beleven valt die dag, is één klik verwijderd van Humo's agenda of, voor thuisblijvers, Humo's tv-gids. Populaire rubrieken als Uitlaat zijn in een handomdraai te volgen. Met andere woorden: instantinformatie en -entertainment voor de mobiele surfer, overal en altijd.

m.humo.be is op zich helemaal gratis. Gebruikers hebben alleen een gsm met internettoegang nodig en een gsm-abonnement dat mobiel surfen mogelijk maakt.

Om de lancering te vieren, presenteert Gunter Lamoot, winnaar van Humo's Comedy Cup 2005, elke werkdag exclusief op m.humo.be een nieuwe aflevering van zijn '2½ Minuut Lamoot Show'.

Sanoma Magazines Belgium ontwikkelde het state-of-the-art platform van m.humo.be met de steun van Coca-Cola, Paratel-Enmovi en Proximus.

All The Smartphone Mobile App Stores

All The Smartphone Mobile App Stores
By John Herrman, Apr 6 2009

° Two distinct kinds of app store:
° The primary store, which is the first and only source of an OS's apps - Apple
° The secondary store, which is built around an existing stock of third-party apps, and with preexisting developers in mind - BlackBerry, Microsoft, Nokia
° Google doesn't alienate users by destroying entire categories of apps, isn't forced to come into conflict with carriers because of overly liberal policies
° The newest BlackBerry mobile app store, is not spectacular
° Windows, non-exclusivity & app approval transparency, a 24-hour return policy and wide device support
° Nokia, will be the most open of all the app stores

It's been less than a year since Apple launched the iPhone App Store, but now virtually every mobile OS is showcasing its own take on the mobile application storefront. How do they all stack up?

The first thing you'll notice about these efforts—coming from such traditionally competitive companies as Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft—is just how similar they all sound. App World? App Catalog? App Market? Mobile Marketplace? This outward likeness actually runs pretty deep—these stores are advertising uncannily similar feature sets, for both users and developers:

Although it might not evident in the feature-by-feature breakdown above, there are two distinct kinds of app store: The primary store, which is the first and only source of an OS's apps (see Apple), and the secondary store, which is built around an existing stock of third-party apps, and with preexisting developers in mind (see BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Nokia). It's a combination of these different lineages and divergent policy choices that make the smartphone app store experience so varied.

° Apple's iPhone App Store
At least for now, the App Store is the standard by which all others are judged. Beyond that, it's given us a rough guide for what works. With a $99 dollar developer's fee and a novice-friendly SDK, the barriers of entry for an iPhone developer are fairly low. Distribution, payments and to a large extent marketing are managed by iTunes, which iPhone owners are necessarily familiar and comfortable with.

And, of course, there's the iPhone: This store may only serve one handset (and its very similar nonphone brother), but it's a wildly popular one. This makes the app store uniquely attractive to developers, because it provides access to the largest uniform app-buying market in the world. Microsoft can argue that Windows Mobile 6.5 will connect developers to x gajillion different customers through y zillion different handsets, but this variety is a curse: Handsets have different resolutions, processors, 3D hardware, input types and basic feature sets. A motion-sensing 3D game with a GPS social networking feature won't work on a lot of WinMo handsets, but a 2D, keypad-controlled Asteroids clone won't make a developer rich.

But the App Store is far from perfect. Apple, like all App Store owners, has the final say in what gets listed, delisted or banned, and they aren't afraid to remind us of this. Along with the typical risque/racist/infringing content prohibitions, Apple enforces strict and often limiting rules against apps that compete with the iPhone's native set—iTunes, Mail.app, Safari to name a few—and apps that their partnered carriers aren't too fond of, i.e video streaming and tethering apps. Now, all these rules are showing signs of loosening with OS 3.0, but as long as the App Store is the sole source of iPhone apps, any rules will seem like too many rules—especially if you're accustomed to a totally unregulated system like Windows Mobile 6.1's. Hence, the gray market.

° Android App Market
This second major entrant into the app store race represents a consciously different approach than Apple's, but not in that many ways. Immediately, we see a lot to compare: A single-handset userbase (at least for now), low costs for developers and a presence as the primary—though not sole—source of apps from Day One.

But the App Market is a different breed than the App Store. Most importantly, it's not the only place you can get apps. Google has been much more lenient about what they allow in their store since the beginning but in the rare case that they don't approve of an app, as in the case of tethering apps earlier this month, you can just go download an .APK file and sideload it onto your G1 anyway. This is a healthy middle ground for everyone involved; Google doesn't alienate users by destroying entire categories of apps, but isn't forced to come into conflict with carriers because of overly liberal policies. Google has also made their Market more friendly to consumers, with a no-questions 24-hour return policy.

Great! Then why is the App Market so underwhelming? Well, the G1 wasn't exactly a runaway hit, and the store got off to a slow start. Paid apps weren't made available for months after launch, and when they arrived they didn't benefit from the convenience and familiarity of a storefront like iTunes. Moreover, there's no guarantee that things will change that much in the coming months—more handsets from more manufacturers will boost Android's user numbers, but will lead to the WinMo-style toxic fragmentation that Apple so adamantly avoids.

° BlackBerry App World
The newest BlackBerry mobile app store, is not spectacular. RIM's is the beginning of this "secondary" app store concept, and it shows: You'll be hard-pressed to find anything here that wasn't previously available elsewhere. It is simply an aggregator for existing applications.

This was a given, as developers have been cranking out BlackBerry apps for years now. But App World was a great opportunity for RIM to give the lethargic dev community a shot in the arm. Instead of doing that, they've made the store almost hostile to would-be app writers.

Listing your wares in App World costs a hefty $200, which gives you the right to upload 10 apps, but doesn't come with any new SDKs or development tools. The payment system is PayPal, which is clumsy to use and a pain to set up. A minimum non-free price tier of $2.99, probably intended to filter out spammy apps and cover PayPal's transaction fees, discourages developers from even trying to make simple, useful apps, eliminating the $.99-to-$1.99 sweet spot that has been central to Apple's success. App World feels like an afterthought, and a reluctant one. UPDATE: It should be noted that the 70% dev revenue share figure in the chart is incorrect, and has been update to 80%—a marked advantage over the other stores.

° Windows Mobile Marketplace
With Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft will introduce the Windows Mobile Marketplace. So far, their announcements have shown an awareness of the pitfalls of both Apple's and RIM's approaches: They're emphasizing non-exclusivity and app approval transparency, a 24-hour return policy and wide device support, but also making sure to get big-name app and game developers on board to ensure that users actually have something new to look forward to at launch.

On the developer side, it's a mixed bag. As in every other store, the dev take-home is 70% of each sale, but the listing fees aren't great. $99 gets you five apps a year, but anything beyond that will cost an additional $99. I'm sure this will help vaccinate the Marketplace against the fart app epidemic that Apple has proven so prone to, but it'll do so at the expense of potentially useful free and $0.99 apps—again, a crucial price range. One important factor that's still TBD is the payment system. Microsoft says they'll support both credit card payments and carrier charges, but hasn't yet said how that'll look. In both cases the process will need to be as seamless as possible.

° Nokia Ovi Store
You probably haven't heard much about this store, set to debut within a month, but it's kind of a big deal for the 40m+ Symbian S40 and S60 users that it'll serve apps to. It's planned to shoehorn into Nokia's new Ovi app suite, which we were introduced to with the XpressMusic 5800, and provide a go-to source for not just apps, but ringtones, wallpapers, and basically everything else that you might have found in a 2001 vintage carrier WAP store.

There has been a decided lack of fanfare surrounding this launch, probably because there just aren't that many Nokia smartphones in the US. But its success or failure will be informative: It will be the most open of all the app stores. For the time being, there is no developer fee, and app listings are free and unlimited. You can easily publish tons of different kinds of content—Flash Lite apps, Java apps, Native S60 apps, multimedia uploads and others—which will be subject to a vetting process that Nokia has assured will be minimal. As Nokia-averse Americans, we can view the Ovi Store as an experiment in laissez-faire app-mongering—a multi-handset, mixed-media, unfiltered feed of Symbian content.

° Palm App Catalog
And finally, we have Palm's App catalog. This is the store we know the least about, but that is already set for a different course than all the others. At launch, the only handset it'll serve will be the Pre—though Palm has indicated that other WebOS handsets are inevitable. It'll be the first—and likely exclusive—source of WebOS apps, and developers will be furnished with a solid, though fundamentally limited, SDK.

Palm's still-vague plan for the App Catalog will no doubt be central to the success or failure of the Pre, but we can make an educated guess at what to expect, assuming that Palm doesn't get taken over by idiots in the next couple months: Palm will vet the apps thoroughly, provide an in-house payment system, and make development simple and cheap (previewed Mojo SDK apps have shown great promise). The end result will probably look something like the iPhone App Store, but with one huge difference: there will be no local natively running apps—the Mojo SDK doesn't provide for that, just for what amount to turbocharged, locally-stored web apps. Granted, these web apps will have privileged access to some of WebOS's core functions, but it's doubtful that high-end gaming, as we've seen on the iPhone, will even be possible on the platform. These limitations (along with WebOS's multitasking advantages) will affect the nature and quality of the apps that are listed in the store much more than the Catalog's policies, though exactly how, we'll have to wait and see.

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about app stores, SDKs or the finest in fart-app technology to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Mobile software, data fees in spotlight at CTIA

http://us.mobile.reuters.com/m/FullArticle/p.rdt/CTECH/ntechnologyNews_uUSTRE52Q4DE20090328

Mobile content's 'long tail' disappears

Mobile content's 'long tail' disappears

Tim Green Oct 13 2008, 2:13pm

Research shows up to 92 per cent of songs in mobile stores have not been downloaded.

Research revealed to ME shows that consumers download just a small fraction of the songs available on full-track mobile services.

Remark : ME is a great publication, thanks Tim ° hope you had a very mobile time in Barcelona. Kevin Space would have said 'Always send the elevator back down'.

Full super article : http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/31672/Mobile-contents-long-tail-disappears