E-ink readers have been popular for a long time and while their design is based completely around reading books and literature it appears that the honeymoon period is coming to an end.

The devices are really useful, I own a Kindle myself and couldn't see myself reading a book on my Surface tablet due to the distracting backlit screen however the mass buying public are perhaps feeling that an e-reader is too ‘limited'.

We would assume that the proliferation of inexpensive Android tablets is also damaging the e-reader market. The bargain Kindle Fire has also hurt sales, according to the opinions of some analyst sources.

Research organisation iSuppli posted the information which looks at sales data from the last five years – the conclusion is a severe drop in sales.

In 2011, over 20 million dedicated ebook readers were shipped worldwide. If the current decline continues however, iSuppli have estimated that only 7 million of these devices will ship in 2015/2016.

They say “This sort of rapid growth and immediate collapse may be unheard of, even in the short lifecycle of the consumer electronics (CE) space, but represents perfectly one of the largest trends in the industry: single-tasking devices being replaced in the consumers’ pocket, backpack and briefcase by multifunction systems such as media tablets. Other CE gear, such as MP3 players and digital cameras, are suffering the same fate; but nowhere is the impact more apparent than on ebook readers…”

Kitguru says: It isn't an unexpected shift as people want a more ‘diverse' tablet for everyday use.

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