E-Books Look To Stuff Stockings This Holiday
If you're wondering about what's going to be a hot ticket item this holiday season, you'd be making a safe bet banking on e-books.
Way back in the day, Sony had the only game in town with a huge cumbersome e-reader. Eventually Amazon stole the show with their Kindle. For the longest time, Kindle has been the go-to device for e-reading with its plethora of content and grayscale, easy-on-the-eyes screen. However, the growth of the e-reader market has exploded with competitors looking to take over Kindle's throne. A recent article from Fast Company noted that e-books are now a $1 billion industry. With that market size comes more 
aspiring "Kindle Killers" to take a piece of that pie.
Barnes and Noble's Nook has seen a facelift of late with the release of the Nook Color. This device not only provides a sleek 7-inch color touchscreen to enhance the reader experience but also runs on an Android platform. The Nook upgrade also has a kid-friendly feature in its "Read to Me" application, a feature that has a professional narrator reading select children's books aloud via the device. In addition, Nook Color is a social device, making sharing book discussions a seamless experience for users via Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Other e-readers look to mix things up to. Sony's e-reader provides a lightweight portable device with one redeeming feature - battery life. Sony claims that users are able to enjoy up to two weeks worth of reading enjoyment on one single battery charge (in comparison to Nook Color's eight hour lifespan). Another device that will also crash the e-reader party will be the iPad. Though it's not first and foremost an e-reader, its iBooks application provides a very interactive reading experience for its users and looks to make even more waves in the e-reader scene.
The e-reader market has grown exponentially over the last couple of years. Do you see this being over-hyped? Or will these devices really be a holiday hit?