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Originally Posted by anappo
> Most of the population of the world that reads books,
> don't own a computer.
Well, not sure if there are any decent numbers on how many people own computers.. But there are numbers for iternet usage. Firstly, according to www.internetworldstats.com the global "internet penetration" currently sits at 23% In europe it's 48% In US it's 72% |
And in India? China? Iran? The entire continent of Africa?
They do have books in those places.
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As for books, a quote from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/22/news
> A quarter of US adults say they read no books at all in
> the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
So for US it's 75% that read books and 73% that "use internet".
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Adults who claim they read books on polls, is a very different number from people who read paper at all.
The idea of moving "from books to ebooks" includes moving from newspapers to rss feeds, from printed catalogs to web listings, from instruction manuals to instructional DVDs. And all those things are happening, but that switch isn't going to happen overnight across all the industries involved.
The move from leisure reading on paper to on screen is just a section of the paper-to-pixels transition. Some of the other aspects are going to take a lot longer to change, if they ever do.
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Even the global 23% is pretty decent one. Certainly not something that indivcates this:
> Kids that are in primary school today will probably be reading
> on electronic devices almost exclusively by the time they are
> in high school.
..is impossible, or even unlikely. Assuming these kids are not those in developing countries.
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Developing countries is exactly what I'm thinking of. Books aren't going away as long as they're profitable, and they'll continue to be profitable as long as large numbers of people can't or won't switch to digital information sources.
75% of the globe not having computers indicates that books will be around for quite a while.
And those kids reading on digital devices? They'll only be exclusive about it if copyright law changes rather drastically in the next ten years. Otherwise, a lot of their casual reading is going to be on paper, because it's not available as ebooks, or they can't afford it. Six teens can read a single copy of
Twilight on paper by handing it around; only one--the one whose parent authorized a credit-card purchase--can read it on an ebook device.
Keep that in mind: Minors can't even buy ebooks on their own. (There's a twist I haven't seen discussed yet.) Teens won't be buying ebooks as gifts for each other. They won't be skipping a soda at lunch to save up money for an ebook. They won't pick up an ebook they like at a sale. They won't be choosing to read ebooks; they'll read what's handed to them, because they can't buy or share them.
Unless the publishing industries start encouraging transferred ownership of ebooks, the switch to digital is going to be stalled. The wealthy will buy all their books new in digital forms; everyone else will buy a few new ebooks (or none), and deal with either paper or pirate versions for the rest.