by Claire_Wolfe

Created on: July 21, 2010   Last Updated: July 23, 2010

The digital age has crept up on us and is revolutionizing the world as we know it. Publishing is one of those areas that has been greatly affected with the introduction of e-books and the invention of several different platforms that can be used to read  e-books. The most famous of those is Apple and with its recent launch of ipad and updated iphone, e-books are even more accessible.

There is the ongoing debate whether paper books will become a thing of the past and everyone has their own opinions on this. From some recent insider views from a well know publishing house, they are not worried at all and are quite excited about the e-books revolution. When an author receives a book deal, an e-book comes as part of the package. It enables the book to be available to a wider audience and can also be slightly cheaper than a paper book purchase. Another suggestion was that if a customer purchases the same book as a paper copy and an e-book, they can read the paper book at home and take an e-reader on the train to read.  It is less bulky and doesn’t take up much space.

The Publishers’ Association Statistics Yearbook released some figures on the 23rd April 2010 that reported a 27 per cent increase in UK digital sales since 2007. In 2009, £150 million of e-books were sold with the majority of those coming from the academic and publishing sector. Paper books in this sector can be quite expensive so they are more attractive as an e-book because they are probably slightly cheaper. It also means that students can carry around several text books at once on an e-reader, rather than carrying lots of text books to and from school or university – they are all in one place.

Travel guides would also work well as e-books, again for the same reason, that an e-reader is much lighter to carry around on holiday than a bulky travel guide. Another idea for the future is to make e-books more interactive by giving the reader options to click on that will produce time lines or maps to illustrate a point in the book.

Social networking sites have also grown in popularity over the past few years and millions of people are involved in the online communities. This makes advertising for publishers much easier and is more cost effective too. When a new book is released, all they have to do is ‘tweet’ it and thousands of people are then aware of it. It can also be a targeted audience, because the members of the sites follow

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