Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp., which dominate the market for electronic book readers, will have to drop the price of their Kindle and Reader devices to about $50 if they want the market to take off, according to a report by Forrester Research Inc.

Seattle-based Amazon.com, the largest online retailer, charges $299 and $489 for its two models, according to its Web site. Tokyo-based Sony lists prices for its Reader at $199 to $399. The two companies have to charge that much because the displays alone cost at least $60, according to Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

“The majority of consumers don’t care enough about reading or technology to invest in this type of single-purpose device at anything close to realistic prices,” she said in the report.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester is forecasting that 2 million so-called e-readers will be sold in 2009, double last year’s total. The maximum number of consumers who would consider buying one at the lowest price, $199, is 25 million, according to calculations based on a Forrester survey of 4,706 respondents.

To reach the $50 price and open e-readers to the mass market, Amazon.com, Sony and other companies will have to make deals with book, newspaper and magazine producers to sell subscriptions that will subsidize their cost, Epps wrote.

Sales of electronic books more than doubled to $25.8 million in the first three months of 2009 from a year earlier, according to the Association of American Publishers in New York. Digital books still make up less than 2 percent of total U.S. book sales, which declined 7 percent in the first quarter, the association said.

Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon.com, and Valerie Motis, a San Diego-based spokeswoman for Sony, didn’t immediately return e-mailed messages seeking comment.

Amazon.com rose 32 cents to $78.46 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. They have gained 53 percent this year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 3, 2009 16:17 EDT