2010, the year of the e-book?

Writing in Australian Personal Computer David Flynn asks Will 2010 be The Year of the e-Book? (No longer online).

He looks at material from tech analyst firm Gartner which says e-books will boom next year so long as they: “Overcome hurdles in price, availability and lack of popular mainstream content”.

He writes:

Barnes & Noble’s Nook is already sold out until January, and as such looks set to be one of the year’s top Christmas gifts for the digerati. Amazon not only put its Kindle onto the world stage last month but has just released a free firmware-based upgrade which adds native PDF support and extended battery life to the ground-breaking e-reader. And then there’s the rumour-that-won’t-go-away Apple tablet reader.

So you could be forgiven for thinking that Garner’s forecast sounds like a statement from the Department for the Bleeding Obvious.

But Gartner has pinpointed a few key areas where the e-reader market needs to pick up its game in order to be the hero category of 2010 and move from the geek elite to becoming “popular consumer electronic devices, culminating in e-reader mania for the 2010 holiday season”.

The technology is almost right, the market less so

They are all valid points, but there also needs to be a great leap forward in display technology for e-books to displace printed books. The current crop of electronic books are tiring to read when compared with print.

Higher resolution, large format, non-flickering, non-backlit displays are available, but not in the numbers needed and not, yet, at a realistic price. After years of looking at other forms of electronic books, it's reasonable to say that once e-book makers overcome this hurdle, they’ll be mainstream.