Ebooks and the future of book publishing
Posted by Jacque on June 9th, 2008
I’ve written about the Kindle — today and previously several times, but what does the publishing industry think of ebooks and ebook readers?
John Blossom reports that despite its limitations, the Kindle “is the darling of book-readers on the go who can’t afford the space, time or trouble of loading multiple books in their overnight bags and pocketbooks.”
The Kindle is also becoming popular among the traditional media outlets because it enables them to maximize revenues when a title gains its peak value in a short period of time.
In fact, although highly speculative, he says that if the Kindle business scales as quickly as Apple’s iPod/iTunes business scaled it’s possible that Amazon could be enjoying more than $740 million in combined Kindle device and content sales by 2010.
If that happens, “then book industry executives may be wondering why they didn’t consider the music industry’s death at the hands of iPod’s proprietary 99-cent downloads as a lesson to have been studied more carefully.”
