Tablets to start cannibalising e-reader sales this year

Multipurpose devices such as iPads to gain as e-reader market peaks

Channel companies should get in quick if they mean to capitalise on sales of e-readers.

As e-reader sales have gone up, actual book sales have fallen. However, e-readers themselves are expected to give ground from the end of this year with multipurpose media tablets the projected winners.

Simon Bryant, head of consumer electronics at Futuresource Consulting, said the global e-reader market is on track to peak in 2013, as large markets such as the UK and US start to shrink "fairly rapidly" due to tablet uptake. There will still be growth in smaller markets for the form factor in 2014 through to 2016.

"We believe there will still be a customer base for the e-reader device, based largely on the unique e-ink platform, which is not a feature of tablet devices, and lower prices in the short term. However, this will be increasingly niche as tablets of e-book size (5in-7in) grow strongly and prices fall to e-reader levels," Bryant told ChannelWeb.

He said UK e-reader shipments were just 0.6 million back in 2010, expanding to 1.9 million in 2011. Last year saw the market hit 2.4 million and another 2.4 million are expected to be sold in the UK in 2013.

Next year, however, shipments would start reducing, with Futuresource projecting that only 2.2 million will be sold in the UK in 2014.

Futuresource's research tallies with that of Informa, which predicted back in 2010 that e-reader sales would peak in 2013 - again pointing to the rise of media tablets, such as the iPad, as the main reason.

Informa expected global e-reader sales to peak at 14 million in 2013, before falling seven per cent in 2014 as the consumer mobile device market continued to diversify. Informa was contacted but said no update on its prediction was available at this time.

Meanwhile, Nielsen BookScan research has found that UK sales of traditional, hardcopy books fell by £74m in 2012 to £1.51bn - down 4.6 per cent on 2011.

Books that were downloaded via devices such as e-readers or media tablets represented 13 or 14 per cent of the UK book market, an increase of about five per cent from 2011.

In related news, Futuresource also found in its latest Living with Digital analysis that 23 per cent of parents living in the US, UK, France and Germany who responded to its December survey said their children had asked for a media tablet for Christmas.