E-readers and e-books: The new bestsellers

MANILA, Philippines - E-readers filled with hundreds of downloaded e-books are expected to be one of the bestselling gifts this Christmas, primarily in the United States and other developed countries where these new tech wonders are available.

Unfortunately for serious book lovers from other parts of the world, including the Philippines, e-readers won’t fill their Christmas stockings this year and they have to be contented for now reading e-books on their notebook computers or iPhones.

An e-reader is easy to use just like an MP3 player and a good companion during long travel and commutes. The e-books can be easily transferred to an e-reader using a high-speed USB connection hooked up to a PC or Mac.

As for the e-books, hundreds, if not thousands, can be crammed into an e-reader and they can be downloaded from the websites of leading bookstores at less cost than a real book or for free from selected websites or from local public libraries.

Major US bookstores like Barnes & Noble and online giant Amazon are pushing the e-book format and their respective e-readers to holiday shoppers. Amazon has a new Kindle e-reader that can hold 1,500 e-books, not to mention it can wirelessly download titles super fast: 60 seconds tops. Amazon, which once changed the way the world buys books, is doing it again, this time by creating a new bestselling product in Kindle.

Also in the forefront of the e-reader sales is Sony’s Pocket or Touch. Sony’s e-readers support multiple file formats so that they can hold a wider selection of e-books. Some models also have optional memory cards to make room for more e-books in case there are people who might feel a thousand e-books are still not enough.

Fans of e-readers and e-books, meanwhile, are excitedly waiting for Apple to join the fray. If Apple is really developing its own e-reader, people bet it would be another game-changer for digital books.

Who’s e-reading?

The typical e-book buyer today is said to be those who also used to buy hardcovers and are primarily educated and married men in their late 40s.

Others already see e-readers as “chick magnets” which perhaps lead some market analysts to suggest that for e-books and e-readers to gain more mass appeal they should also become more attractive and price-friendly to women.

E-readers are still quite pricey at $200+. Market researchers believe it will gain mass appeal if e-readers get to the $50 price range, otherwise it won’t be as ubiquitous as MP3 players. With notebooks and smartphones offering alternative platforms for e-books, industry pundits see only about 10 million people owning e-readers by the end of 2010, or one percent of the 110 million who have MP3 players.

But with color screen e-readers in the pipeline and as the consumer electronics sector sees a bit of recovery from the recession, hopefully, the number can still go past 10 million.

Meanwhile, an e-book today sells at an average price of $8.30 versus $14.55 for a hardcover version. In the case of Amazon, e-books have a fixed price of $9.99.

The Association of American Publishers estimates that sales of e-books jumped 68.4 percent in 2008 and further increased to 177 percent to $96.6 million in August 2009.

Looking at the bigger picture, the association noted that e-books account for only 1.5 percent of the $6.8 billion books sales of 2009. However, they don’t discredit the fact that e-books’ growth rate is outpacing hardcover sales.