Dedicated e-readers are being superseded by tablets and big-screen phones
Dedicated e-readers are slowly giving way to tablets and big-screen phones. But the freedom from distraction these devices provide will be missed.
The invention of the e-book caused a seismic shift in publishing. But is the e-reader it gave rise to now on the wane?
Like the PDA, the digital camera and the iPod, it was once the hottest gadget around, but the mono greyscale screen with the month-long battery is quickly giving way to tablets and big-screen phones.
Forrester's World eReader and eBook Forecast reported in June that just five years after Amazon released the original Kindle, more than 25 million people in the US owned e-readers in 2012. But that figure is set to decline to seven million users by the end of 2017.
Sales figures of e-readers - which also include those by both Kobo and Nook - are hard to come by, but it's certainly the case that the e-book revolution has so far been slightly suppressed in Hong Kong, where copyright issues mean hardbacks and paperbacks regularly become available before electronic versions.
But the popularity of e-books locally appears to be on the rise. A survey of 805 of the one million visitors to July's Hong Kong Book Fair revealed that 35 per cent of respondents bought e-books in the previous year, up 19 per cent on 2013, while 61 per cent had read an e-book in the past month.
Those figures tell us much about modern reading habits, but little about e-readers; an e-book can be read on a tablet or smartphones, the latter of which continue to grow in size.