Rafi Mohammed, Ph.D. of The Huffington Post has declared eBooks the official future of digital publishing. Read his article here to judge for yourself if his reasoning is sound.
It’s been a whirlwind year, and the recent developments are very promising, but do you think it’s too early to declare a win for eBooks? I’m still waiting for the eBook Reader priced $99 or less. Then we won’t be in Kansas anymore, yah?
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I agree.
When VCRs finally dropped below $100, the market took off. Later, the DVD market skyrocketed when DVD players broke the $100 mark. Blue Ray is on that path and will probably become ubiquitous when reader prices sink below $100.
I fully expect eBooks to do the same thing when a decent reader crashes the $100 barrier. Hopefully, by then someone will have figured out how to marry color and digital ink.
However, one other thing will probably happen and that’s the format shakeout. VCR’s killed off Beta. DVD’s knocked out several other competing formats but continue to vacillate between +R and -R (with -R the apparent winner).
I don’t know which eBook format will be the eventual winner, but I suspect the main contenders will boil down to ePUB, PDF, and Kindle (prc & azw). We currently offer the 4 major formats at AKW Books.
I’d like to see ePUB (improved) as the winner since it’s not proprietary and readers can change font sizes (unlike PDF). However, PDF is still the most faithful at reproducing the intent of the publisher.
Any device that uses Adobe’s Digital Editions reader should be able to handle either ePUB or PDF, so we may end up with dual formats dominating. Amazon may have to play catch up at that time, but that company seems to be fairly flexible when competition threatens.
Whatever shakes out, eBooks will make a dent in paper sales, but will not likely replace paper any more than VCR/DVD/BlueRay replaced movie theaters.