E-books are a big deal
"Opinion"08/26/2010
Paul Munnis
I know that you have been reading a lot about electronic books and Amazon’s Kindle book reader plus many other offerings are beginning to flood the market.
Maybe you did not know that you can try Kindle out for yourself and you do not need to spend even a nickel to do so. Just go to our link on the left side of the front page of TRD and click on Amazon’s link.
The choose Kindle Store from the various departments. Select the tab: Kindle Support.
Then download the Kindle for PC application. That let’s you read free Kindle books on your PC. After registering with Amazon (you might already have an account) then down-load some free books and start to read them on the reader.
Are Kindle and the other e-Book readers a real change element in American and world life experience? I think so and here is why:
From the readers viewpoint these devices are light-weight and portable. The e-books work on a Blackberry, your home PC, a Kindle unit, a Mac (any of them) and a mobile phone when the free software is installed. Compare that to a book like Giant some 1000 pages of print. The physical book is quite heavy.
These books are cheaper in e-format.
Text books are available as e-Books thus making the school book bag lighter.
Increasingly authors are writing for direct sale and are not going through a publishing house. Thus they retain the copyrights for themselves and they do not have to share profits with others. Soon you will be able to sign on your favorite authors website and buy e-books directly from them. Until them the aggregators like Amazon are going to make money offering a centralized bookstore online.
For publishing houses the cost of publishing drops radically as printing and shipping costs dwindle to near nothing. The script submitted by writers is all electronic and the result is little to no compositor cost.
Thousands of free books are available from a variety of sources ranging from Project Gutenberg, to Google, to nearly every publisher seeking to get your purchasing attention.
The impact on libraries, writers, publishers, and readers is huge. Now magazines and newspapers have been added to the format and the result is more than you can read in a lifetime. Every thing published in Adobe Reader format can be read on e-book devices too.
Some subject areas like biology and chemistry are changing so fast that publishers cannot keep up. With e-Books they can keep up with change and so can the students who need the material.
Yes, e-Books are an elemental change to the way that knowledge and information is transmitted, read, archived, and updated. The impact on the book-store, publishing, and distribution industry is profound.
How long before somebody develops software that can automatically animate an e-Book? I don’t think it is too far off.