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Originally Posted by HistoryWes
I saw an interesting article online (sorry, I don't remember where) that posited ebooks quickly wiping out paperbacks, and paper books becoming luxury items, much better made and fancier.
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I'm sure the dream of every tree friendly person on this planet would be to see ebooks become king, and paperbacks die out (the savings on printing costs would be a huge plus), but I've got a gut feeling that you're going to see ebooks start out and remain a niche market for some time. Case in point. When netbooks first came out, OEM's couldn't keep them on the shelves. Now that the market has become saturated, and the majority of demand met, it's getting hard for OEM's to push new netbooks.
I see the ebook market doing the same thing soon, if it isn't already. The question is, when are we going to hit that invisible wall, or have we already hit it and just don't realize it? And if we have hit that wall, how long will it be before we knock it down and push past it? I'm not trying to disparage ebooks, but there's a lot of ifs here and the market is still relatively new. It could be waiting for the price of ereaders to go down a bit more (a perception of price to value), and it could merely be waiting for actual habits to change, the later being a much longer, more drawn out process. Either way, we're still only really just seeing the beginnings of this market, and it's nowhere near the explosion point as so many have predicted would happen eventually.