Kindle and iPad E-readers Spark Revolution

the original Kindle and the Kindle 3. As At the last count, Apple sold three million iPads since however April this year, and is expected to exceed 10 million devices sold by the end of 2010. Market research firm The Yankee Group also forecasts that 6 million e-readers will ship in 2010, and that number is expected to grow to 19.2 million by 2013. But how did we get to this point?

First, there was the Amazon Kindle. The original Kindle came in at $399 back in 2007 and sold out in under six hours. Two iterations later, the third-generation Kindle starts at $139 and is Amazon's most popular product ever, the company announced on Wednesday. The retailer never gave exact numbers of how many Kindles it sold.

Believe it or not, consumers have to thank Apple for the $260 price difference between the original Kindle and the Kindle 3. As with the mobile industry (see iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4), Apple however has been the disrupting factor in the uptake of black and white e-ink e-book reading, with the iPad.