Will Tablets Kill E-Readers?

Wrong question, but the answer does in fact matter

So I've gotten a bunch of calls lately asking exactly that, no doubt spurred by the Apple iPad announcement. But I think this whole issue is much more complex than first meets the eye, begging a couple of far more interesting additional questions. But, still, it's fair to ask - will tablets kill e-readers?

No, they won't. The e-reader (typified by the Kindle, but there are in fact many of these with more to come) is designed primarily a device for reading old-fashioned books - you know, sequential text, no illustrations (and thus no need for color or very high graphical resolution), static material that doesn't change over time and thus can be distributed and priced atomically, and otherwise firmly wedded to the past - perhaps it's best to think of e-readers as bridges to the future for the more conservative users out there. Sure, the Kindle and a few of the others can perform assorted other tasks, but they're not terribly flexible or programmable and may not be useful for other functions beyond casual access to media or the Web. But E-readers are, granted, cheap and very convenient to use, again with consideration of their limited range of function. It's not hard to see why these have sold well.

Now, while tablets, in and of themselves, haven't been a great success in the horizontal market, I (again) think the iPad will do very well because of the familial relationship with other Apple products. Customers in general like Apple - the products work, they're fairly easy to use, they're cool (great marketing), and Apple has built an ecosystem around both the Mac and iPod/iPhone/iPad (with more to come, I'm sure) lines that pretty much guarantees sustainability, thus limiting risk on the part of the buyer. The right question, then, is just how many mobile devices does an individual need, anyway? I don't think anyone wants to carry more than one handset, and I think the same can be said regarding a mobile computer. If Apple is right and the iPad becomes the third device for any given consumer, I doubt if that person will want to stuff an e-reader in their bag as well. Indeed, as I previously noted, I think the iPad will replace the netbook for many, the key variable being a requirement for physical keyboard functionality. And netbooks today are just smaller notebooks, so... you'll carry a small-screen device, primarily optimized for voice, and a larger-screen device, optimized for media and computational tasks. That should do it. Want to read a book, magazine, or whatever? You've already got two platforms for that. Do you really need an e-reader? The real question is thus begged. An e-reader alone should do it for those who just want to read a traditional book. But the audience of people who want to do more than just that while on the go is far larger.

And there are some bigger questions:

-       Do we want to continue to produce fundamentally atomic, serial media? Even an otherwise static novel could benefit from Web links, access to a title-specific Web site, and all manner of additional value-add (and thus revenue-add). Static books, apart from a few special cases like government (legal) documents, seem like a quaint approach indeed.

-       Do we want content tied to a specific platform? Yes, I know Amazon makes a lot of money selling titles for the Kindle, but the real opportunity is in getting that content into as many paying hands as possible. Is there any justification for a proprietary media format? That's been tried, and the results are not pretty. And I don't want my choice of media limited by my choice of platform. That's Apple's point in having a platform family, and the next step is standards for content. But since there are so many vested interests in the content wars, such may take some time. Conceptually, though, a Kindle could just be software on an iPad or any other mobile platform.

I personally have no intention of buying an e-reader. I rarely read traditional books as I've defined them above. I want a color display. I want access to everything, everywhere, online and whenever I so desire and on whatever device (or at least whatever form factor) I choose. E-readers, I think, like PDAs (replaced by smartphones), mobile internet devices (MIDs; ditto), and perhaps SmartBooks (a non-Intel branch of MIDs that still hold some promise), will likely just fade away. These are regardless all good first steps towards what we really want - a device-independent world where content is ultimately all that matters.

• Wireless / Mobile
• e-content
• e-reader
• iPad
• Kindle
• smartbooks