Wednesday 25 May 2011

MATIN

In the past years, we have had a taste of what books are becoming but the big question is, what will become of this and what will the future ideas be for taking more money out of our pockets! eBooks will be both a technological advancement and also a huge sector in marketing and business.

A huge advancement will be the introduction in portable library’s, i.e. the ability to borrow books for a period of time, something that Amazon’s kindle is already exploring. The Kindle Lending Library will allow over 11,000 public libraries in the US to lend copies of digital books to Kindle users for short periods of time (probably 7-14 days). Innovations of this will probably ultimately bring the extinction of the book. However this will not happen for the next half-century for only 7% of people actually read eBooks. However the same company which is working on the lending-library, OverDrive is now working with apple on the iPad and it’s app, iBooks.

ACHILLES

In my article, ‘Why the Book Business May Soon be the Most Digital of All Media Industries’, I learnt that the aim for eBooks in the US was: by the end of 2010, $966 million in eBooks would have been sold to consumers; and by the end of their five-year forecast of the progression of eBooks, they expected the industry to reach $3 billion (over three times more than what they had just five years ago) which would “forever alter the industry”.

Even though some people are said to prefer proper books, they still have an ‘e-reader’ and they are slowly increasing their amount of digital books in their library. e-book buying falls very low down on this list of how people acquire books. Just 7% of online adults who read books read e-books. But that 7% happens to be a very attractive bunch: they read the most books and spend the most money on books. And here’s the kicker – the average e-book reader already consumes 41% of books in digital form. Oh, and that includes the people who don’t have an e-reader yet, which is nearly half of them. For those that have a Kindle or other e-reader, they read 66% of their books digitally.