Trying To Kindle The Market

So people ask me, "What's the deal with your Kindle?"  And I like reading books, as many as I have, it's nice to have a few on the Kindle too to save the mass of lugging the books around.  But the real market for Kindles and other e-book readers isn't guys like me, but students with dozens of textbooks.

As Sony Corp.’s e-book devices vie with the Kindle to win over readers, the real showdown may come later: when a shift to electronic textbooks at schools threatens to eclipse the current market for the products.

Sony and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle are both expanding into the academic world. Students at Blyth Academy in Toronto do all their reading on Sony devices, and five U.S. universities are testing the Kindle. The days of students lugging around heavy textbooks may be numbered, said Sony executive Steve Haber.

“The only ones upset about this are going to be chiropractors,” Haber, who oversees the digital reading unit, said this week in an interview. “It makes perfect sense to move to education.”

Within five years, textbooks will be the biggest market for e-book devices, dwarfing sales to casual readers, predicts Sarah Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Corning Inc., which is developing glass screens for e-readers, expects textbooks to fuel about 80 percent of demand for those components by 2019.

“Print will expire faster in the textbook world than in the trade book world,” Epps said. “The technical barriers will disappear and five years is enough for the content to catch up with demand. The potential is there.”

In other words, 80% of e-book sales will be for textbooks by the end of the decade, and technology will have made these readers cheaper and more powerful.  Imagine a backpack full of textbooks replaced by a Kindle or a netbook PC...or a netbook that was an e-book reader.  Woulda made my life a lot easier back in the early 90's.  Who knows how far these things could go.