E-Books Go Mainstream Thanks To E-Book Readers
The consumer market for e-book readers, and the e-books to read upon them, absolutely exploded in 2009. E-book readers have been around for over a decade. The Franklin eBookman was launched in 1999. The Sony PRS reader launched in 2006 and Amazon’s original Kindle reader launched in November of 2007.
However it was the launch of the upgraded Amazon Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009 that saw e-book reader sales skyrocket. The large format Kindle DX followed in the summer of 2009 and by the end of the year Sony had launched three new PRS readers and Barnes and noble had also entered the market with the release of the Nook reader.
The Kindle quickly became Amazon’s number one selling product and, over the Christmas period of 2009, became the “most gifted” ever Amazon product. In the meantime, even more e-book readers are being launched. In early 2010 Apple got in on the act when they unveiled their new iPad. Potential e-book reader customers were absolutely spoilt for choice.
The market had grown and developed at an extremely fast pace. Although the public became accustomed to e-book readers very quickly, some of the major publishing houses were finding it difficult to cope with the changes. Many of them were unhappy with the fact that inexpensive e-book versions are being made available immediately alongside the newly released hardback version of books.
The normal publishing cycle of hardback edition followed, usually some months later, by the paperback version has now been supplemented by the addition of the e-book version. There’s no reason to delay the release of this – and it would be inadvisable anyway, after all, e-book reader owners are likely to be avid readers and are therefore in the target demographic for new book releases. Of course, customers aren’t going to be willing to pay anywhere near to the same price for an e-book that they would for a hardback, or even paperback, edition. And why should they? There’s no paper, ink or bindings involved and the delivery charge for a downloadable e-book is a fraction of a fraction of the cost to deliver a physical book.
E-books have resulted in some fairly tense discussions between book retailers and big publishing houses. Amazon’s policy of pricing e-books at $ 9.99 or less even led to McMillan books being briefly removed from the Amazon site. As previously stated, e-book reader owners will be amongst the publishing houses best customers. Unless the big publishers adopt and adapt to the new technology and learn to use it to their advantage, they will lose out, lose customers and eventually become extinct.
Check out the Amazon Kindle reader for yourself – there are over 400,000 Kindle books to pick from.
Tags: books, ebooks, electronics, product reviews, reading, technology