Electronic Paper — Paper Route
It’s entirely possible that e-paper device manufacturers are barking up the wrong tree with e-books. According to the latest data from the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales for the month of September were $2.4 million, up 1.3 percent from August (and up 21.2 percent over September 2005).
Print Still is Preferred
This is not a huge niche (for comparison’s sake, audio book sales in the same month were $16.4 million, and adult hardcover sales were $192.5 million). And while electronic books have their adherents and proponents, there was a reason the technology didn’t take off in the late 1990s: people who tend to buy books tend to really like printed books, and find electronic alternatives anathema. Will this change on a generational timeframe? Maybe, or we could see a generational shift away from book-length documents. But that’s another discussion for another time.
Regardless, our outlook for electronic paper as a display technology is quite bullish, but we feel that while the first-generation devices are impressive, the real application for electronic paper will be incorporated into next-generation PDAs, cellphones, MP3 players—or whatever omnipurpose device evolves out of the merging of all of these disparate gadgets. The combination of a flexible or rollable e-paper display with a device that can access the wireless Internet and access updated content is a killer app waiting to happen.
Technological hurdles abound, of course. As the Web becomes more rich media-based, it is several strides ahead of the capabilities of the current crop of e-paper technologies. PI
About the Authors
PrintForecast.com is a global information service that provides senior-level executives reliable, easy to access printing, publishing and content-creation market forecasts. Dr. Joe Webb, well-known industry forecaster, consultant and commentator, is one of the firm’s three founding partners. Much of this article was excerpted from the recent PrintForecast.com reports, “E Is for E-Paper: An Electronic Paper Primer for the Graphic Communications Industry” and “E-Paper Technologies and Opportunities in Publishing, Communications and the Graphic Arts.” For more information, visit www.printforecast.com.
