"But a couple of months ago, BookExpo America 2002 in New York was virtually devoid of e-book chatter. The two-year-old International eBook Award Foundation folded this year due to lack of funding -- and interest. About the only time you hear the topic mentioned in publishing circles these days is when this question comes up: Where have all the e-books gone?
There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and praise its capabilities, but the plain old reading public -- on the beaches, in the coffee shops, at the Metro stations -- just aren't buying into e-books. You don't see a horde of people devouring Huck Finn on a handheld or "Ulysses" on a laptop....
But maybe e-books never really caught fire because there was never a deep desire for them in the first place. The 500-year-old book -- with white paper pages and night-black ink -- is a perfectly good technology for providing word-based information....
'The core everyday book buyers are still overwhelmingly attached to a paper book,' Applebaum says. 'Those everyday book buyers are largely men and women over the age of 40. That is not the demographic that is the early adopter for new technology.'
Writer Warren Adler says, 'I'm not an e-book reader. I'm too old for that. I'm 74.' But the author of 'The War of the Roses,"'"Random Hearts" and a couple dozen other novels is betting that e-books will eventually be widely read. To that end, he has bought back the rights to nearly all of his books, and he has set up a Web site, www.warrenadler.com, to sell them. He's selling about 250 e-books a month.
'I'm not making money,' Adler says. 'I'll tell you that right off the bat.'
But he does say that his sales go up every month and it's his only chance to keep his books in print." [The Washington Post, via TeleRead Blog]
Can someone please explain to me when it was decided that ebooks would completely replace printed books? Why is it so difficult for the media (let alone publishers) to view them as a complementary instead? (That's a rhetorical question.)
Here's a novel idea - let's think of ebooks the same way we think of audiobooks. No one believes that audiobooks will replace printed material and as a result, the format carries far less pressure for market penetration and sales figures. In fact, this is one area where libraries are recognized as a valuable market. So let's all agree here and now to apply these same principles to ebooks, both text and audio. Growing sales figures and markets are a good thing. Not everyone will choose to use them, and that's okay. And libraries are a valuable market for ebooks, a fact publishers and manufacturers should acknowledge.
There. That wasn't so bad, was it?
