A plug for books Kim Farnell on how e-books are re-shaping the way we read and write, with a little help from Apple and Kindle
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books are not nearly as new fangled as people think. The first, a copy of the US Declaration of Independence, was scanned into a Xerox mainframe computer back in 1971 by Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg. Initially written for a niche audience, e-books originally comprised technical manuals and similar texts. Once the internet became generally available in the 1990s, the ebook emerged as a new format for mass-market books. Now you need no longer sit in front of a computer screen to read an e-book. A host of hand-held devices has been designed specifically for the purpose. Each uses a different format and theoretically you can’t, for example, read a Kindle book except on a Kindle (in reality there are ways of converting certain files). Protecting an author’s copyright is one of the main concerns when distributing e-books and piracy is a major problem. Even encryption is no guarantee. It took less than 48 hours before the encryption on Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, the first mass-market e-book in 2000, was broken. Since the launch of the ipad, there has been a 20 per cent rise in searches for pirated e-books – according to a study by internet monitoring company Attractor, there are now 20 | theJournalist
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up to three million searches a day, with the US and India each being responsible for 11 per cent of searches. And from the consumer’s point of view, there’s the issue that some e-book distributors are able to enter your account, and delete or change your e-books. In 2009, Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles without warning due to copyright problems. Territorial rights issues are a nightmare for distributors and are the reason Waterstones stopped selling e-books to customers outside the UK. There are limitations with e-books – some formats don’t support images, and it’s difficult to reproduce colour graphics, tables, and figures on small screens. And although production costs are lower, the price of many is only slightly less than that of a mass produced paperback.
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Sales of e-books are predicted to reach 3-5 per cent of the market by next year
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However, there’s no doubt that e-books have a rapidly growing market. Last year, Amazon reported that sales of e-books for its Kindle outnumbered sales of hardcover books. Paperback sales are still much larger than either hardcover or e-books. A Publisher’s Weekly study found that among Amazon’s top-selling titles, such as The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson, the percentage of units sold as e-books ranged between 15-33 per cent. E-books have yet to achieve global distribution although the information technology analyst firm, Gartner has predicted that the global sale of electronic readers will be around the 6.6 million mark. E-book sales represent between 6-10 per cent of sales for some US publishers. For some titles it’s higher – Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom sold 600,000 hardbacks and over 300,000 e-books in the US. Figures from the Association of American Publishers and the International Digital Publishers Forum show the e-book market to have grown from a $67.2 million in 2007 to $415.2 million for 2010 – more than 500 per cent growth. The AAP put e-book sales growth figures at 193 per cent for 2010 and e-books currently account for approximately 15 per cent of trade sales in the United States.
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