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In a recent comment, Doogald mentioned that in his opinion the relatively high price of Ebook Readers was keeping them from being more widely adopted….now there is data to back him up.

In a recent survey, consumer product researchers Forrester asked a straight forward question…"At what price would you consider an electronic book device/eBook reader expensive but still purchase it?" The answer was not really surprising, but very very clear. The graphic above speaks for itself. Once you drop below that magical 99 Bucks price point, people interested in buying EReaders effectively doubles. More importantly, once you get less then 99 dollars, more than half of all online adults and about three quarters of upper middle class, frequent book readers would be willing to at least consider the purchase.

That $99 Dollar price point also tends to be the magic number for phones and MP3 players as well…it just has that combination of feeling like an affordable splurge, I suppose. At this point, Ereaders start at around $199 for the Sony Pocket and go up into the mid $400s for the Kindle…but with these kind of numbers there is clearly a market need for a cheaper, well designed, widely distributed model. Whoever gets it out to consumers FIRST will have the chance to be to EReaders what Apple was to MP3 Players, or at least what Asus was to Netbooks…that is, the market will be theirs to lose.

Alright vendors….GO.

Zealot (473 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).