How digitisation is changing the publishing world part II

E-books on the rise

A book is an e-book is a computer game is a film is a website

It’s all about the content.

For several years, more than 30 per cent of the products exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair have been digital.

The selection of digital products presented by the publishing industry is on the rise.

At this Bookfair 361 exhibitors include e-books in their assortment. New at the Bookfair this year are the book communities, internetmarketplaces and mobile applications such as the collective stand Books&Bytes who provides an overview of everything new with regards to books and the internet.

With the hype around the new generation of reading devices such as Kindle, iLiad and the Sony Reader, a lot of market growth is expected, especially in the education and fiction genres.

Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian author and guest at the Fair, put it this way:

“For fifteen years, as a media form, the book has proven unsurpassable. Of course, e-books are slowly claiming ground and it’s likely that, in due time, the digital form may override papaer. But this will take a few more years, which gives is-publishers, booksellers and writers – a precious moment before the Web makes its move. Yet what I saw as a writer came as a surpirise, and a lack of understanding of the Web on the part of the industry. Instead of seeing in this new media an opportunity to invent new ways of promotion, publishers concentrated on creatin micro sites, which are totally outdated, and a few of them complained about the ‘misfortunes’ of the other cultural industries, perceiving the Web as the ‘enemy.’ This is probably the same attitude the copyist monks had with regards to printed books back in the 16th century. Yet, given that book as media are still widely used, why not share the whole digital content of books for free? I was lucky enough to see this hapenning to my books in Russia, back in 1999, where I had a very difficult beginning. Given the great distances, my books were very poorly distributed and the Sales were very low. Yet, with the appearance of a pirated digital copy of ‘The Alchemist,’ that later on I included on my official website, sales took off in an amazing way. To this day, I have reached the mark of over 100 million books in this territory.”

Exciting times are coming up, I’m looking forward