Report: EReader and EBook Market Ready for Growth (ReadWriteWeb)

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

Epps acknowledges that Forrester's initial reaction to the Kindle as a niche device that would only attract a small number of book-loving early adopters underestimated the fact that consumers would fall in love with the Kindle's one-step shopping system and the immediate gratification of buying books in the Kindle store. Epps also stresses that while users could easily rip CDs and copy them onto their MP3 players when they first appeared in the 1990s, transferring paper books into an electronic medium is obviously a lot harder. So consumers, for the time being, are more likely to prefer a vendor that can provide an Apple-like integration between the hardware reader and the book store.

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