The Yin and Yang of E-Readers
E-reading has been one of the hot topics in digital technology in the past few years. While the leading players—who started off with a monopoly—still continue to have their large share of the market, other players are slowly and steadily entering the space making it a domain closely watched by the device and software makers, content providers, and end users.
Improvements on the hardware, software, and content side of things are being seen at a steady pace, making it a true landscape of survival of the fittest. Given the number of entities involved, this is a domain that requires a lot of negotiation and regulation among players—publishers, content owners, software makers, and device manufacturers—to ensure delivery of a holistic reading experience for the end users.
Some dynamics around pricing have made this industry subject to a lot of lawsuits and trials—including the recent one between publishers and Amazon and Apple. In order to retain and grow market share, organizations continue to enter global markets to establish a stronger footprint. For example, Amazon has recently launched its Kindle in China and also has established its presence in India.
From a device market penetration standpoint, the industry is moving toward a trend of tablets from e-readers with iPad and Kindle as lead players. Organizations continue to make some very important decisions about replacing their bulk paper manuals with tablets that enable digitized reading. This makes the playing field particularly challenging for e-readers since tablets offer the best of both worlds, allowing for both e-reading and computing.
From another viewpoint, there are the end users who are on the fence about drawing a balance between e-reading and print-based reading. While it is an easy decision to start e-reading simultaneously with print-based reading, as they immerse themselves in it, they are at a crossroads on whether or not to completely switch to e-reading.
From a software development angle, this domain calls us to consider multiple aspects. For example, from a testing standpoint, testers need to consider several angles—content functionality, content digitization, and platform—to test and release an integrated reading experience.
As we witness all of these complementary forces at play—content providers vs. device makers, competing device makers, and at the end user level—it is very interesting to see facts and numbers that show a strong growth in the e-reading market with a forecast for the e-reading numbers to surpass print numbers by 2017. All of these factors make this industry very Yin and Yang driven, and the forces at play continue to make this a very self-corrected and regulated market.
