Ars on the state of the eBook market

This is a very good article on Ars Technica about the state of the eBook market.

I used to read quite a lot of Baen books on my palm, and I still do it to some extent, but it has diminished for several reasons:

- First Baen seems to be the only publisher that offers books in DRM free multiformat, so I only bought from that one publisher, which is somewhat limiting.

- Second there are a lot of other media competing for my reading time. Music, Video, Games (Nintendo DS) and short stories webzines published for free on the web (such as Aphelion) all compete with professional eBooks for my time.

5 years ago you couldn't get a satisfactory Video or gaming experience in a pocket format, now most PMPs and portable games consoles deliver this. the problem for publishers is that these compete with eBooks AND printed sales. This doesn't mean I won't buy eBooks from Baen again (I still look at their new offerings from time to time), but this means that book publishers really need to get their act straightened up or they will lose even their printed market.

I think the publishers that get it will get a decent market share however. After all, if you count the eBooks I bought more novels from Baen Books that from any other publisher in the last 10 years.

The microprocessor market contracts

The big processor manufacturers predict that the market for semiconductors could shrink 30%.

I think it is a wonder that the price of processors maintained itself for so long.

Look at what the average user does with its PC: Web surfing, a bit of word processing, writing emails, the occasional flash game or youtube video. Most 3 year old PCs are already overpowered for such usage, so why would anyone buy a new PC with a more powerful processor?

I think that we are going to see a split in the PC market:

- On one hand the mainstream desktop or netbook, for such easy tasks and maybe some multimedia. Progress will be on price and portability rather than on computing performance.

- On the other hand the gaming / media creation PC where the focus will stay on performance, but which will keep a relatively high prices compared to mainstream.

With Atom Intel is growing the mainstream category on price (they sell the chip cheap, but it is cheap to produce) AND on portability rather than on price alone. Portability also give consumer an incentive to replace their "powerful enough" PC.