Publishers Must Pander To E-Book Reader Owners
Posted By Jasper Longfellow on March 27, 2010
In 2009, e-book readers seemed to become enormously popular. These readers have been around for 10 years now – the Franklin eBookman was launched in 1999 – but it was the release of the Amazon Kindle 2.0, on the large format Kindle DX model in the summer of the same year, that seemed to launch both e-book readers and e-books onto the mainstream consumer market. The Kindle quickly became Amazon's number one selling product and, with the rapid growth in the e-book market, competing manufacturers either upgraded the existing readers or launched new ones to get their share of what was clearly a rapidly developing market.
With so many different e-book readers available, and considering that they are “hot gadgets”, it's no surprise that there is a lot of focus on the hardware. It would be easy to get so wrapped up in the technical considerations of e-book readers that the broader – and possibly more important – implications are overlooked.
The fact is that, in addition to changing the way that people read books, e-book readers will also modify the way books are published, purchased and deliver. Without overstating the case, e-book readers may very well be the biggest change in books and reading since the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg.
When it comes to reading, the majority of potential customers are probably more interested to learn how e-book readers stack up against reading “real” books than how one e-book reader compares with another. The e-ink technology displays used in modern e-book readers really are very good and produce a reading experience that is similar to reading printed text on paper. A recent survey of U.S. e-book reader owners found that 80% of them preferred using their e-book reader to reading a traditional paper book. That's a strong recommendation for e-book readers.
These days, most e-book readers include either 3G or WiFi wireless connectivity. That means that, as long as you have a connection, you can buy and download an e-book whenever and wherever you like. A lot is made of the fact that e-books do not require any paper, ink or bindings. The fact that the delivery of a physical book can double its carbon footprint is often overlooked. E-books are both environmentally friendly (even taking the materials and energy used in the production of reader hardware into account) and cost less than traditional paper books.
As far as publishing goes, e-books change the traditional cycle of hardback release followed, usually a few months to a year later, by the paperback edition. The cheap e-book edition is now released at the same time as the newly published hardback version. This is something that has caused the big publishing companies – who want to protect their profits from hardback sales -something of a dilemma. However, they will need to accept the new technology and change their business models to suit.
E-book reader owners may be in the minority at the moment, but they are fast becoming an influential group. People who read a book a month are not about to rush out and buy an Amazon Kindle or Sony Daily Edition reader. People who own e-book readers read a lot of books. They represent the target market for both booksellers and publishers and will be every bit as instrumental in deciding the future of books as the e-book reader manufacturers will.