DO EBOOKS SPELL THE END FOR CONVENTIONAL BOOKS?

I've been following the E-book development with interest. Unlike some I do believe that digital books are the future and that they can happily co-exist with regular books but market analysts don't think so and are predicting a rise on Ebooks sales year on year until regular books all but vanish


Amazon reported that 5% of its book sold are ebooks but market analysts are predicting double sales next year in 2010, as well as predicting the eventual death of the brick and mortar book store.
Analysts say that as sales of digital formats rise, sales of regular books will decline, meaning that book stores will begin to see fewer and fewer sales, making them non-viable in a fast growing market sector.


I do hope that is now the case and that the advent of the Ebook is positive, that it will encourage people to take up reading again for pleasure and enjoyment. I can't wait to see the availability of long out of print genre fiction - westerns, mysteries, whatever. At the moment the emphasis is firmly on the battle of the Ereaders with Amazon's Kindle so far the market leader but its dominance looks shaky. I for instance love my Elonex but given its lack of flashy additions, its simply a reader, it looks like it will vanish from the market. Still it can take most formats including PDF and Epub so I'll always have something to read on it. NOTE - I've added this in 2016 and my current eReader of choice is the excellent Amazon Paperwhite


In fact the lack of commercially available reading material has benefited me - I've been downloading scores of Public Domain books from Gutenberg and the excellent Planet Ebook and I've been reading those classics that I'd always intended to read - in the last couple of months I've read and enjoyed Tom Sawyer, the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, Moonstone, 1984 and Riders of the Purple Sage as well as the Edge Ebook series. And a quick look around the Internet comes up with scores of pulp classics that I can enjoy at sometime in the future. All you need to do is convert them to PDF files and the Elonex can handle it.

I don't know what will happen in the future and I would hate to see regular books vanish but it is certain that The Archive will keep reporting on the digital book revolution.