For the past 10 days the display and consumer electronic world has been focused on the CES in Las Vegas. With 3D on the front burner and other goodies like EBRs, wireless home entertainment, connected cars, etc. on every news channel we are now educated on every aspect of consumer electronics for the next 12 months. Or are we?

Norbert Hildebrand
Insight Media Analyst

During the show the focus is of course on new devices and technologies. Not only can they be shown in pictures, video or written articles, they can be accurately described and tagged with a $ amount and a shipping date. The more interesting question here is the consumer acceptance for all these new gadgets, something that can’t be expressed in a number quite yet. By the end of 2010 we all will know the winners and losers but for now it is time to get out the crystal ball.

Everyone in the consumer electronics-marketing world has used the technology adoption lifecycle curve as proposed by Everett Rogers and later modified by Geoffrey A. Moore as shown below. Not only does this make an impressive chart in any Power Point presentation, it gives every presenter a chance to predict a bright and growing future for the newly introduced gadget.

Of course in real live "The Chasm" will absorb some of the players and others will prevail and thrive. In nature we call this "survival of the fittest", but in business we call this market consolidation. From this viewpoint, I walked through the EBR-Zone at CES, looking for things that could interfere with the market adoption of EBR in the coming years.

Currently the EBR industry is in a start up mode and the already achieved sales success is spawning new devices and product ideas on a weekly basis. This is good and healthy for any new industry and pushes the envelope of technology and hopefully leads to broader market acceptance in the coming months and years. The question the industry now faces is ‘what does the consumer really want’?

So far the "Innovators" have bought into the EBR concept and are happy with the device and provided functionality. But how will the "Early and Late Majority" buyers react to the EBR concept?

A key ingredient for answering this question is content availability. While buying a printed book in most cases is a straightforward affair (you pay — you take it home) buying an e-book (digital version of a book) is more of an intangible transaction. With software purchases moving more and more to an Internet based delivery system, one can expect that ultimately downloads will be accepted by the consumer. However, buying an e-book over the Internet or wireless/cellular network today might be a risky proposition, as the buyer does not know if the book will actually display on their e-book reader. There are so many formats and DRMs that the average consumer can never be certain when purchasing on the open market.

Most EBR companies have identified this complex format issue as a potential threat to further market growth. Therefore, they are offering company bookstores as an easy and foolproof way to buy books. Of course this is also driven by the great success story of Amazon and its Kindle reader.

It almost looks like every device will be set up to buy books only through a dedicated bookstore. This is not what the consumer is used to and ultimately wants. He wants competition and lots of it, so that he can buy the book he wants at the lowest price possible. This model is closer to the Barnes and Noble approach with multiple reader devices being able to access their content.

The solution that is necessary for the broad adoption of EBRs is a standardized delivery format. While this is still a dream today, it looks like ePub from the IPDF (International Digital Publishing Forum) is gaining momentum with many device manufacturers. In the end the consumer wants to buy an e-book at any store and to read it on a device of his choice. Only then will mass adoption become a realistic option.

Until then, we may indeed be looking at a trend that can get us into the chasm of the adoption cycle.

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