Quote:
Originally Posted by HamsterRage
And maybe Japan and Australia.
To be honest, I'm not sure what the paperback book market is like, or whether it even exists, in places like India, central China, Africa or South America. So when people say that only eBooks are only going to take over in a few countries, I have to wonder if there's even a pBook market in those other places. So is it relevant to bring them up?
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It is, if you intend to include the world in your scope when you talk about it.
And there are indeed paper book markets in all of those places. Where you have literacy, you will have books.
It will be more complicated in other places. Consider India, where people speak Hindustani, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu, and a dozen more mutually unintelligible tongues, each with a different written alphabet. Or China, where there are a number of mutually unintelligible dialects with a single written form, but the written form is based on ideograms and not a positional alphabet, causing all sorts of complications for how you write text electronically and how you display it once you have.
The bigger issue is that ebooks require devices that can display them, places to get ebooks to display, ways to get the ebooks on the device, and the infrastructure to support all of those things. That's not universal, and won't be for some time.
Paper books have the edge there. They can be printed and bound at a central location, and transported to where they will be read (by camel back or the like, if necessary). And once there, they don't require things like electronic devices to read them, or electric power for the devices.
It will be some time before the remote villager in Afghanistan uses an electronic device to read the Holy Q'uran.
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Dennis