New Forrester analysis on ereaders, why would I need 2 PDAs?

A netbook? A tablet PC? Does it matter? asks Sarah Rotman Epps from Forrester. For those doing business right here (media) right now (april 2009) it matters.

Sizing the ereader opportunity, Forrester expects its penetration to begin doubling YoY from 2010 reaching a 4,5% penetration by 2012.  In this presentation there is not much information on how piracy could affect content providers with the spread of these devices. MP3 players are now very popular but music providers are not in a very good situation.

It is a good document to recap the ereader situation and what we can expect to happen in this area.

Where I disagree with this presentation is when inisists in the widely discussed idea of ereaders not being ereaders but PDAs.  For many, in order to be competitive, ereaders need to include a touching screen,  audio and video capabilities, wireless connectivity, etc.

This is not the competitive advantaje of an ereader. An ereader has an approach that we may call: technological austerity. What is important in an ereader is that you don’t need to worry about charging its battery and you can store lots of plain text. No pluggins, no software, no colour, no touching screen, etc. It’s just a way to approach texts in a more static and profound way. And, therefore, that is why personally I cannot see the future of newspapers flooding into ereaders (not totaly, but partially for sure yes), because news are dinamic and constantly changing and updated. Ereaders are, in fact, a response moving backwards to what is important for so many: contents built on words. For contents built on audio or video, no worries, we got other much better devices already.

Most of times, this criticism to ereaders comes from people who are in fact not yet heavy users. I combine my ereader with my pda, then I still have some books, and for some other things I still use my laptop. If my ereader battery couldn’t last weeks (or months), if it got hot, and it was aggresive to my eyes, I would just leave it and use more my PDA. If e-ink can progress into a kind of pda with a different (more efficient) process, then we are just talking on a new PDA generation, but, most experts in e-ink admit that this is, by far, science fiction at the moment. And, if that is the case, why should I have 2 PDAs? In that case, there is no point to develop theory, because ereaders would just be the future of PDAs and so, business side, what we do in PDAs we would do in ereaders; i.e. there would not be a different business case nor such a different product.

There is a clear trend towards convergence also in devices but this is not something we will see in a very short term in terms of e-ink/PDA merge. Making business plans or predictions taking that device convergence for granted is for sure interesting for academic and longer term strategic purposes but is of little value for business managers that need to build up solutions (revenue streams) today. Even more, if such a convergence came after 5 years, we got 5 precious years ahead we couldn’t lose to gain competitive advantage over our competitors. Business leaders in media right now cannot wait to potential convergences in order to make decisions around devices, and so, decisions must be taken with market conditions today: PDAs and ereaders are (today) different products.