Mike Elgan's Six Trends That Will Make E-Books "Take Off" This Year
Over at
Computer World, technology Blogger Mike Elgan has an
interesting look at six factors he believes are currently interacting to push us to a cusp point into the world of e-reading.
A lot of it is topics and ideas we've discussed here before, often in great detail, but it's interesting to see his take on how he sees them interacting and why he believes the e-moment is at hand.
Here's his list:
- The economy: leaner times have folks looking for cheaper entertainment, and Kindle book savings pay for Kindles relatively quickly
- The environment: primarily doing away with all that paper for daily news consumption
- A publishing revolution: people starting to self-publish, freelance editing, and the fact that the publishing industry hasn't really changed all that much for ... well, a really long time
- The rise in aggressive e-book marketing: the publishing industry as being up for grabs to the ones who pursue e-books most aggressively
- A rise in books written for electronic reading: the nature of the electronic medium will affect the very nature of "books" themselves
- The decline of the newspaper industry: "The old method of physically delivering blog entries on dead tree pulp is obsolete" -- papers that fail embrace the electronic will simply fade out
It's interesting that the emergence of truly workable tech for e-reading isn't on his list, and equally interesting that the economy is.
His conclusion:
Quote:
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After decades of false starts, the e-book revolution is finally upon us. By this time next year, e-books will be totally mainstream.
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You can read the whole thing
here.
Personally, I think he makes a decent case, but decent cases have been made for this before. What do you think?