Falling interest in Kindle and Nook: the decline of ereaders?
I'm a big fan of Google Trends. It's partial, and you need to think carefully about what you're actually looking at, but used properly it can be very revealing of market trends.
So, caveats aside, this chart shows US search volume for Kindle, Kindle Fire and Nook. Three things stand out:
- A large and unsurprising spike at each Christmas
- A really substantial decline for 2012 versus 2011 - close to 50%
- The Kindle Fire, supposedly the future-proof successor to the Kindle, appears to be falling, not growing
Amazon, of course, tells us nothing tangible about how the Kindle is doing, but Nook's numbers (as reported by Barnes & Noble) are looking terrible, which is consistent with this.
It seems to me that several things may be going on here:
- General-purpose tablets (mainly the iPad) are more proving more compelling to consumers than special purpose tablets like the Nook and even the (rather more capable) Kindle Fire
- Cheap general purpose tablets (which are very hard to capture in Google Trends, as an aside) have removed or reduced the price advantage the Nook and Fire had last year
- These devices have quite long lives - especially ereaders (i.e. the Kindle). Maybe most of the addressable market bought one in 2010 and 2011 and those people didn't come back to the market in 2012
There's a broader story here, of course, in the way that the growth rate of ebooks seems to be slowing as they reach a third or so of the market.
The UK data shows a trend that's slightly different: Nook is MUCH weaker (reflecting the absence of real distribution or brand) and Kindle Christmas interest held up better in 2012, probably reflecting the later UK date - ebooks seems to be about 1 Christmas behind the USA. However, the drop-off seems to be sharper in the beginning of 2013 than in the beginning of 2012, just as in the USA.
The same point is even more clear if we look at search volume for 'ebooks'. The deceleration is clear.
