Is the printed book becoming a relic of the past?

When I was going to college, I loved going to the library to study, sitting in a nice comfortable chair, and reading until I fell asleep. When Borders came out with the bookstores in his neighborhood, I did the same and often left the store with a book that I had the pleasure of trying out in the same comfortable way. Now, most people buy their books on the Internet and read them on their Kindle.

One Internet phenomenon has been the consolidation of retailers into new monopolies. Retailers like Netflix replaced blockbuster stores like Blockbuster Video, who found it impossible to hold up their brick-and-mortar retail stores against the power of the internet and the popularity of streaming downloads. Newspapers have become obsolete by publishing the written word more quickly and, consequently, journalism has had to adapt to try to maintain some kind of quality.

The same has happened with the publishing industry and physical bookstores. Borders, one of the “blockbusters” of the books, was gobbled up by Barnes and Noble, which now finds its biggest competitor to be Amazon. Amazon has developed a set of tools that allow authors to enter the publishing industry, a place previously reserved for the elite and more closed than the world of Hollywood cinema.

A recent study found that nearly 70 percent of consumers say they are unlikely to give up printed books in 2016, and UK market research agency Voxburner recently surveyed more than 1,400 people, aged 16-24. , about your media consumption habits. ; the survey found that 62% of respondents said they prefer printed books to e-books.

I was surprised by these findings because I was sure that e-book sales had grown at an exponential rate. The annual BookStats study reports that 457 million e-books were sold last year; an increase of 4456% since 2008, when 10 million were sold (http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/15/e-book-sales/2159117/). Although sales of paper titles are higher, the steady increase in the number of e-book sales cannot be ignored, which I still believe is the future of publishing. I think demographics have to be taken into account, as most older readers will naturally choose a print book, while younger readers, who tend to do their homework on their laptops, will opt for an e-book.

According to New York Times bestselling author Hugh Howey, who has turned his back on the publishing industry and now publishes his own books, makes more money from desktop publishing and frees up his time using agents of persecution. and publishers to write more and better books.

Print books are still being bought because non-Gen Y readers are slow to convert to Kindle. They prefer to have a printed book in their hands, so there will be a market for the printed book in the near future. However, e-book sales continue to rise and older readers are buying Kindles. Impulse buying is much stronger with e-books, which are delivered instantly and are cheaper than print books. I believe that the reading public will continue to prefer print books, but over time, e-book sales will overtake them, simply because of demographics.

My e-books have print versions that are sold on Amazon and also offered at Barnes and Noble. Although sold only online, online book sales account for more than 50% of all book sales, as recently reported in Digital Book World (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/online-retail- now-accounts-for- nearly half of US book sales /). I think the trend is for online sales to take over traditional retail sales. We’ve seen a lot of bookstore closings and consolidations over the past few years and I think we can continue to see more. I myself will miss being able to go to a bookstore, pick up a book and relax in an overstuffed armchair while I try their tickets to see if I feel like buying it, but there is no denying the trend. My e-book sales are still three times higher than my print book sales, but the option is there to appeal to both markets, and that’s what Amazon is doing by providing authors with its “Create Space” platform. .

I think publishers have to offer e-book and print formats to appeal to both sides of the market. In the end, it is the quality of the book and the promotions that is used to publicize more than the medium that it will control. Like any other product, you need to package it and offer it to the consumer in a way that suits their shopping habits.

However, as the reading public ages, new readers will be oriented almost exclusively to e-books. I regret the disappearance of the printed book, but I don’t see that anything can be done about it, except to keep them in libraries and museums. With the trend towards iPads and Kindles, and public schools even proposing the delivery of iPads to students, young people will eventually grow up not knowing what it’s like to read a printed book. Technology will do the same with the book as it has done with the printed newspaper.