Noted analyst Gene Munster (of Piper Jaffray) predicts that Apple has a gap to fill between the iPod touch and the MacBook, that gap evidently being the yet-non-confirmed Mac tablet. The device would be priced between the $500-700 range, but wouldn't see the light of day until FY 2010, due to the complexity of the OS it would require.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the Amazon Kindle
Steve Jobs frequently makes disparaging remarks about markets that Apple later enters (MP3 players, mobile phones, games, etc), so there’s little reason to believe that we won’t all have ‘iBooks’ in three years time. Still, the numbers don’t lie - 40% of people in the US (and 34% in the UK) do not read books any more. They may surf the web, or the read the occasional newspaper, but they do not read more than one book (fiction or non-fiction) in a year.
The closer you look at the statistics, the more depressing it gets. In the US, only 47% of adults read a work of literature - and I don’t mean Shakespeare, I mean any novel, short story, play or poem - in 2006. If that doesn’t sound too bad, consider that it’s declined by 7% in only ten years. It doesn’t matter whether you look at men or women, kids, teenagers, young adults or the middle-aged; everyone is reading less literature, and fewer books.*
...the New York Times is the 27th most popular thing Kindle users buy.
One other important note from that internal New York Times memo my colleague Zach got a hold of: The company reports it has “more than 10,000 paid subscribers” to an electronic edition of the newspaper on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader.
