Portraits of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are shown on the home screens of Nook readers from Barnes & Noble, which use technology developed by E Ink Corporation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts October 25, 2012. Amidst our growing love affair with the tablet, spare a thought for its increasingly shelfbound sibling: the e-reader. Take Taiwan's E Ink Holdings Inc, which makes most of the monochrome displays for devices such as Amazon.com Inc's Kindle and Barnes & Noble Inc's Nook. After five years of heady growth during which shipments rose 100-fold, it got a jolt at the end of 2011 when monthly revenues dropped 91 percent in two months. E-readers initially benefited from their reflective displays, which can be read in sunlight and require very little power. But the success of Apple Inc's iPad, improved backlit displays, power-saving technologies and new smaller tablets all point to one thing: the e-reader has become a transitional technology. Picture taken October 25, 2012. To match Analysis EREADERS-FUTURE/ REUTERS/Dominick Reuter (UNITED STATES - Tags: SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS)