Dan’s Writing Blog

E-book readers really took off in 2009. 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 such a large number of e-book readers available, and bearing in mind that they are hot and trendy gadgets, it’s hardly surprising that there’s 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, as well as changing the way that books are read, e-book readers will change the way that books are published, purchased and delivered. 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 most modern e-book readers are extremely good and give the reader an experience which is very similar to reading text printed 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 fairly solid endorsement of the reading experience.

The majority of e-book readers incorporate either 3G or WiFi wireless connectivity today. That means that, as long as you are in an area with coverage (most areas these days), you can purchase and download an e-book whenever 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. The fact is that e-books are both environmentally friendly (even allowing for the materials and energy used in the production of the reader hardware) and cheaper than conventional books.

As far as publishing is concerned, e-books amend the conventional cycle of hardback release followed, typically a few months to a year later, by the paperback version. The cheaper e-book edition is now available alongside 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. E-book reader owners 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.