Eight percent of U.S. adults owned a tablet device in May, up from the 5 percent that reported having one in November 2010, according to research by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

Meanwhile, ownership of e-reader devices stood at around 12 percent, the research center said. Adoption of such devices continues to grow at a faster rate than tablets, having doubled from 6 percent market penetration in November of last year. In addition, hree percent of survey respondents reported owning both an e-reader and a tablet.

In terms of overall penetration, however, e-readers and tablets continue to lag behind devices such as cellphones and laptops. Of the 2,277 respondents Pew surveyed for the research, 83 percent reported owning the former, and 56 percent the latter. MP3 player ownership stood at around 44 percent, meanwhile.

 

Too bad they don't have ads yet:

Story from CIO Today. Full story here

According to media reports published Wednesday, Amazon.com now believes it will ship more than eight million Kindle e-readers this year -- about 60 percent more than the 4.8 to five million range forecast for 2010 by financial analysts. Earlier this month, the online retail giant observed that it has been seeing huge demand for its latest Kindle devices.

"In just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we've already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl display," Amazon noted. "In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009."

 

From MinOnline. Read Full Story here

Hearst Reveals Skiff E-Reader

By Steve Smith

The e-reader field is getting more crowded by the day. Hearst subsidiary Skiff offered up the specs and first images of its portable digital reading device before the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was set to launch this week in Las Vegas. The Skiff Reader will try to distinguish itself from the Kindle, nook, Sony eReader, QUE and other e-ink devices with size and portability. The 9 x 11-inch unit will hold an 11.5-inch (measured diagonally) display, which does out-size the large Kindle DX and the Plastic Logic QUE. (More images are below.) This display uses a special ‘metal foil’ technology that offers touch screen interaction but does not require a glass protective coating. The 1200 x 1600 resolution screen will run at 174 dots-per-inch, which should appeal to print newspaper and magazine publishers looking for greater detail. The screen is still black and white, however, and it remains to be seen how quickly an e-ink display at such high resolution can refresh itself as it changes pages. One of the chief frustrations of the e-ink devices is their very sluggish performance and muddy display of images.

The Skiff Reader is putting a premium on paper-like portability. It claims to weigh just above a pound. The battery is expected to last a week under standard usage. The device also sports 3G and WiFi wireless connectivity as well as a USB port for side-loading content from a PC.

The Hearst-owned company is putting print publishers front and center in this model. The company says the Skiff will access an online store of newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and other content from a range of publishers. The Skiff is promising to host print brands with unique design attributes, interactive elements, and dynamic content updating “that help publishers differentiate themselves and attract subscribers and advertisers,” the company said in its statement.

Sprint will provide the cellular network for downloading content almost anywhere, but the wireless carrier will also provide a distribution channel. Unlike the Amazon Kindle (available online only), the nook (available in Barnes & Noble) or the Sony eReader (in bookstores), the Skiff will leverage Sprint’s 1,000 phone retail outlets. Other distribution channels will be announced later, as will pricing and date of release.

Finding the right distribution mechanism for the Skiff could prove its toughest challenge. Obviously, the B&N venue would favor its own device, even if it did open itself to multiple vendors. Borders Books retail stores have been featuring the Sony devices for some time. And Skiff has no brand recognition of its own with which to build much of an online draw to an e-commerce site. Relying on a tech provider like Sprint is dubious, since wireless carriers do not have expertise in selling content-centric devices. In fact, content partners to the major carriers have long complained how poorly these tech-driven companies merchandize mobile content.

To make matters worse, all of the e-ink readers are about to be eclipsed by the relentless hype surrounding the rumored release of an Apple tablet, which many expect to be announced later this month.

Nevertheless, the march of the e-reader devices continues, with voice-recognition innovator Ray Kurzweil announcing a new color e-reader, the "Blio," today at CES.

Sit back and watch the fragmentation begin.

From Marketing Charts. Read full story here.

They are not right about the long-term viability of alternative methods of delivering news via e-reader type devices but this story points out some of the horrible economics currently in place for publishers distributing content on Kindle and similar devices. One missing ingredient the story does not mention - ads. Currently the e-readers don't deliver the ads with the content but presumably when that begins, it will change the equation.

E-readers, Tablets Not Likely To Save Newspapers

Some industry watchers had predicted that e-readers just might save the newspaper industry - but that has yet to happen, despite the fact that e-reader sales are soaring, reports MediaBuyerPlanner.

About six million e-reader devices - including Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s e-reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Conde Nast’s Skiff - will be sold this year, Forrester predicts (via EditorsWeblog).

Newspaper publishers get 30% of subscriptions sold on e-readers, and more newspapers are becoming available every day. Digital newspaper distributor NewspaperDirect, for example, is boosting the number of newspapers and magazines available on the Kindle by 1,400, according to Canada’s Globe and Mail.

Newspapers Can’t Make E-reader Numbers Work

But six million e-readers sold are a pittance when compared with the general US population of more than 300 million people, and the number of newspaper subscriptions sold via those devices will be even smaller. “If the Dallas-Fort Worth area has two percent of that, that’s only 6,000 Kindles,” said James Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News. Moroney crunches the numbers in a Portfolio article, showing how insignificant e-reader subscriptions really are.

Tablets - the New Newspaper Savior?

Tablets are the latest device being touted as the savior for newspapers, MediaBuyerPlanner said.  With touch-screen interfaces, color screens, web browsing and e-reader capabilities, some think such devices will speed the consumption of digital newspapers. Apple’s iSlate is one such device, said to be ready for launch early this year.

However, as these devices are expected to cost as much as $1,000, they may not be considered as “must-haves” for many consumers. And e-readers boast longer battery life and text that is more easily readable.

Newspaper publishers could boost the potential to cash in on tables by fully embracing multimedia content production and multiplatform distribution, points out the Innovations in Newspapers blog, which offers 10 ways newspapers must adjust in order to take advantage of new content delivery systems like tablets and e-readers.

E-reader Audiences More Affluent, Well Educated

One hope for newspapers in terms of e-reader audiences is that users skew higher in terms of education and income than the general public, which means newspapers may be able to attract more luxury advertisers. According to Mediamark Research & Intelligence, e-reader users are 11% more likely than the average adult to own their home and are 87% more likely to have annual household income of $100K+. And they are 111% more likely than the average adult to have obtained a Bachelor’s or post-graduate degree.

“Clearly, users of the current generation of e-readers are highly educated, upscale and internet savvy,” said Anne Marie Kelly, SVP, marketing & strategic planning, at MRI.

From paidcontent.org: IRex offering better deal to publishers than Kindle. (See related story a few entries down in this blog). The IRex e-reader is hoping to compete with Kindle, in part, based on its ability to attract periodicals. Sounds good, but will people buy the IRex?

"How does the iRex model for periodical publishers differ from Amazon? Hamilton’s pitch: “We’re saying, you promote your product, you price your product, you format and deliver your product in the way that you want to and you’ll enter into a 1-to-1 relationship with your customer. We’ll facilitate that and we’ll take a piece of the revenue. We don’t want to stand in between the customer and the publisher, if you want to cross sell or upsell or cross market or do other things with your customer, it’s your customer. We’re not going to try to dictate or control that. The Amazon approach is very different .. The publisher is cut out of the loop. Almost every publisher we’ve gone to has been very dissatisfied with that model and they’re very eager to be connected to their customers.”

Full story here

I have been arguing for a while that the e-reader could be the silver bullet for print products. I like the fact that the content is controlled and have always felt that it offered a compelling proposition to advertisers, if and when, advertising was made available on devices like the Kindle and the Sone E-Reader. I thought, the day would come when e-readers, rather than the web, would become the way newspaper and magazine content was dispersed. Maybe I was wong. 

Jack McKeown lays out a compelling argument that the e-reader adoption is likely to be much slower than the e-reader manufacturers would have us believe. In fairness, McKeown is the former CEO of a book company, so he may not be completely objective but his arguments are worth considering.

From paidcontent.org: full story here

Here is an excerpt:

"There is mounting evidence that screen-reading, even on reflective E-Ink devices, is not the same as reading print on a page. Recent articles in publications including Slate, The Washington Post and O Magazine, make the case that screen reading is more distracted and less immersive. Studies by Ken Pugh, president of Yale’s Haskins Laboratories, and Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, point to the same conclusion. A piece in today’s New York Times (NYSE: NYT) also looks at how the reading experience differs between paper and screen."