People are changing the way they look at books, literally. With the fancy for technology, the new decade has brought about a new look on casual reading, the way of e-tablets.
Tablets like Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Apple’s own iPad, are in a fierce battle to gain market share. They know that readers holding their devices will most likely shop at their e-commerce sites, essentially proposing a whole new publishing model, one that sells directly to the consumer.
This is noteworthy. Even more so when Pew’s research shows that 19% of the country owns a reading device or tablet of some sort.
“We are still in the early stages of the transition,’ said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project. ‘It's a big deal for the publishing industry, in the same way that the transition to digital news was a big deal for the newspaper business in the late '90, and the same way Napster was a big deal to the music industry in the early 2000s."
If this is true, it means we have undergone a major paradigm change. Traditional publishing houses would agree that e-book reading is a force to be dealt with. Amazon’s Kindle offers free literature on major titles, essentially giving free access to a library of e-books on any reading device. This mode of reading can be done on a traditional tablet, computer, laptop or even a mobile phone or PDA. That’s why the big push has been to sell these devices.
Pew’s research sizes up the number of tablet sales at 33 million so far. There’s no doubt about it, e-book reading is the new mode for enjoying literature and news.
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