As holiday season closes in, e-books exploding in popularity

I really think that e-book reading is going to take hold and become a significant money-making industry.  So far people have held tightly to the tradition of holding a book in their hands to read.  We are sentimental about the smell of a book and cuddling up in bed with our book.  People have been talking like this, claiming that it’s unlikely that e-book readers or reading books on screens will ever take hold.  I would like to say today: the day is coming when we will fully give up this sentimentality.

We have seen this with the IPod.  People claimed that music lovers wouldn’t accept the MP3 (lower quality) format; however, MP3 is the standard and MP3 players fly off the shelves.  Buying CDs is becoming less popular.  Readers spoke favorably about holding a newspaper in their hands and not reading news online.  Newspapers are experiencing the worst of times; readership is down and prints are cutting back and closing shop.  Viewers have claimed that they don’t want to watch their programs on a computer screen; but Hulu and Joost and Sling.com are proving this wrong.  All networks have their shows available online.  We don’t seem to mind at all watching shows on small screens or our laptops. 

Books are one of the last frontiers.  I think part of the resistance to reading books on our devices is that the selections have been limited and the features of most book readers is too different than the reading a physical book.  However, as software becomes more familiar to the book reading experience and we continue to rely on our devices more for text reading, the transition to reading online becomes less of a leap.  I project that in ten years, we will hear more about the effects of this trend on book stores, libraries, and publishing.  If the prices of books online drops as well (no publishing costs), hopefully reading will flourish again.  I would love it if I could get a copy of my favorite books for about $5 each; the cost of a movie.  Why should it be more?  An author and a movie publisher are producing content for our enjoyment.  Should the value of a book vs. a movie vs. an album vs. a video game be so different?