The tablet is killing the ebook reader: Study says shipments to fall 36% this year
Worldwide shipments of dedicated ebook readers such as the E-Ink Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook will fall by 36 percent to 14.9 million units this year, and plummet to just 7.1 million units by 2016.
Context & Ripple Effects
The forecast closes a loop that opened in 2008, when CNET argued e-book readers didn't stand a chance — a call that looked wrong through mid-2011, when Pew found e-reader ownership had doubled in six months. The new shipment numbers mark the turn: the category that grew fastest in 2011 is now projected to shed more than a third of its volume in a single year.
The pickup was broad — ZDNet, paidContent, SeekingAlpha and others all ran the same study on or about December 12, 2012 — which matters because both named victims are also tablet sellers: Amazon with the Kindle Fire line and Barnes & Noble with the Nook HD, meaning each can absorb the decline only if its tablet business replaces what the E-Ink devices lose.
First-order effects
- Barnes & Noble faces the sharpest exposure: the Nook is its named hardware franchise, and a 36% one-year shipment contraction leaves less volume to fund the content store behind it.
- Amazon loses high-margin E-Ink unit sales but keeps the customer relationship if those buyers migrate to Kindle Fire tablets or the Kindle app ecosystem rather than defecting.
Second-order effects
- Competition between Amazon and Barnes & Noble shifts from reader hardware to tablets, where they face Apple and Google's Android partners on price and ecosystem rather than competing mainly against each other.
- E-Ink display suppliers lose their anchor volume as the two largest reader brands de-emphasize dedicated devices, pressuring component pricing across the small e-paper market.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory toward 7.1 million units by 2016 holds, the dedicated reader survives only as a niche for battery life and glare-free reading, with book retailing consolidated around app stores on general-purpose tablets.
- The pattern reinforces a broader rule in consumer electronics: single-function devices get absorbed into multipurpose platforms once those platforms hit acceptable price points, forcing hardware makers to compete on ecosystems instead of form factors.
The trend: Dedicated single-purpose devices are being displaced by multipurpose tablets, pushing device makers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to compete on content ecosystems rather than hardware categories.