Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. E-books, Content, Advertising and HardwareEmerging relations between, and implications for big media, discussed in this Financial Times article.E-book advocates highlight content evolution By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York Financial Times Published: August 31 2009 03:00 | Last updated: August 31 2009 03:00 Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division, stood in the New York Public Library last week with a picture of a stone tablet, a book and the electronic book reader he was there to unveil . The evolution from pages to pixels was as profound as that from CDs to MP3s, he argued. Sony's devices, priced as low as $199, heralded "the mass-market expansion of digital reading", he claimed. Two months earlier, Sony's main rival in the e-book battle had taken a similarly long view. The book "has had a 500-year run", said Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com chairman who launched the Kindle reader. "It's been an unbelievably successful technology, but it's time to change." To date, reality has not lived up to the hyperbole on e-books. A recent Credit Suisse report found that wholesale e-book revenues were $1.48bn last year, or 5.5 per cent of the global publishing market. Most were scholarly texts, with consumer e-books selling just $78m. Current e-readers are suitable only "for the upper class, people over 45, big readers, big travellers, early adopters," said Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of Hachette Livre. But the technology and pricing of e-readers is changing fast, as devices from Interead, Hearst and Plastic Logic, backed by retailer Barnes & Noble, join Amazon and Sony's brands. Forrester Research expects the US e-reader market to grow from 1m units to 12m by 2012 as new devices offer wireless connections, touch screens and, in time, colour displays. The book industry sees in e-readers a chance to improve on its challenging business model, where publishers pay advances before reading authors' finished works, guess at what print runs to pay for, bear the costs of storing books and then shoulder the cost if unsold copies are returned. Newspaper and magazine publishers see a similar chance to save on costs, and are rushing to get on to devices whose consumer appeal offers a better chance of charging for content than they have online. Read the rest of the article Labels: ebooks, hardware industry, Information Technology, media, newspapers, publishing industry, software industry Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
