Just four years after the Kindle reading device arrived to launch its perverse attack on printed books worldwide, I wonder what effect this has had on the industry as a whole.
If you think about it, it takes less than three seconds to download a book to your e-reader, so in the time it takes to receive a single paperback you could already have thousands of books at your disposal. Perhaps this is the crux of the matter after all. E-books are becoming more popular by the day. Yet, people still love real books, and a small percentage have even admitted to buying a paperback and the Kindle version.
Surely the knock on effect of paperback sales is still affecting publishers worldwide. An e-book sale prediction released today by Matt Blind shows a staggering prediction of an increase by 250 million dollars by just 2015. Speculative this figure might be, but we know that e-books are being downloaded daily, and at an astonishing rate. And it’s not just the gadgets that are hot on the increase, but the content! Get this.. mini digital books – also known as “e-singles” and somewhere between magazines and traditional books in length are a growing market.
We can only sit back and wait to see what effect this will all have on traditional publishers in the future, whether they will somehow benefit more if they fully embraced this fast moving technology, or will tradition prevail? It will be very interesting to see what happens in the years to come.
More :
The Guardian – amazon-kindle-ebook-sales-overtake-print
The Examiner – The Christmas rush for library e-books
The Telegraph – E-book the preferred method for children
