E-books Today

With the high technologies invented in this era of digitalization, many things are being improved with high-end technologies such as TV is enhanced with the technologies of high definition (HD) and 3-dimensions (3D); not to forget even books are being digitalized to be published as e-books. The idea of computerized books is actually to create reading book-types of material from small, portable reading units. (Herther, 2005) This allows people to access easily through internet as e-books are downloadable from the internet. E-books actually went through a real bumpy road before it becomes an evolutionary path to market maturity. According to the statistics provided by International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), it showed nearly a 4-fold increase in e-book sales from year 2002 to 2010 in United States.

US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales




Before e-books were accepted, it actually has a few factors that obstruct its growth in the world which are standards, digital rights, content, pricing, device dilemma, integration and robust market.
In terms of standard and device dilemma, e-books actually lack of a clear, open standard for operating systems. E-books in the older days actually are not synchronized and each of them uses their own operating systems. This makes the readers uncomfortable due to different limitations provided by different companies. Digital rights are the issues of protecting the content and the rights of content owner. E-books actually encouraged many major book publishers to invest in the field or e-books, however there are still some worries such as the content might be downloaded illegally by users such as music now. However it is now much more secured with sites such as Safari to offer full texts online by charging a reasonable fee to users. (Cox, 2004) The early contents were actually depended on the voluntary participation of book publishers. If there were less participation, there would be less content and it is hard to attract users. Pricing for software is actually harder than putting price tags on physical books; or it should be say it’s a 2 different things. Pricing for e-books must be balanced profit between publisher and author. As for integration and robust market, e-books are actually being viewed as a distinct segment in the digital world. People actually rebutted that “A book is a book.” They don’t accept a soft copy form of book as a real book.

References
1. Herther N. K. 2005, The E-book Industry Today: A Bumpy Road Becomes an Evolutionary Path to Market Maturity, The Electronic Library, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 45 – 53.

2. Cox J. 2004, E-Books: Challenges and Opportunities, D-Lib Magazine, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 1 – 15.

3. Shatzkin M. 2010, Ebook Growth Continues to Accelerate; How Long Can This Go On?, online, retrieved on 12th November 2010, from http://www.idealog.com/blog/ebook-growth-continues-to-accelerate-how-long-can-this-go-on

4. Industry Statistics 2010, online, retrieved on 12th November 2010, from http://idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm