You And Your Electronic Books

Reading an article by Sue Halpern in The New York Review of Book (June 20, 2010) entitled, “The iPad Revolution” I came across this interesting paragraph:

“According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales fell nearly 2 percent last year, to $23.9 billion. Educational books and paperbacks took the biggest hit. Their downward trajectory seemed to confirm what Steve Jobs said to The New York Times back in early 2008, when he reflected on, and then dismissed, the newly released Kindle, a device which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,’ Jobs told the Times. ‘Forty percent of the people in the US read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.’

“Imagine his surprise, just two years later, when the number of book apps–books that can be read on the iPhone and iPod touch–surpassed the number of game apps in Apple’s own App Store, and sales of digital books for machines like the Kindle and the Sony Reader tripled, to over $313 million, with analysts at Goldman Sachs predicting that US sales of e-books would grow to $3.2 billion by 2015, and that Apple would command a third of that pie….More people may not have been reading, but those who were doing so on digital readers seemed to be reading a lot.”‘

So, the word to all writers: keep writing and your work will appear on paper on on some book apps, somewhere!