Reaching A Larger Audience With E-Book Readers
Online retail giant, Amazon, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and the original Amazon website launched in 1995. Today Amazon is an extremely successful business and one of the best recognised and most trusted brands on the planet. It’s easy to forget what a radical idea buying books online and having them delivered by mail was at the time. Many business analysts predicted that Amazon would struggle – and it wasn’t until the end of 2001 that they reported profits.
Having altered the method by which many people purchased books, Amazon expanded into other areas very rapidly. Audio CDs, video, consumer electronics, computer software and toys were all additions to Amazon’s portfolio. Today you can buy almost any consumer item that you can think of from Amazon – including your groceries.
As well as adding to their product range, Amazon launched websites in France, the UK, Germany, Canada and China. However, they never lost their original passion for books and they continued to retain a very strong association with books in the perception of the buying public.
This was something that would stand them in good stead in November of 2007 when the Amazon Kindle e-book reader launched. Having already changed the way that books were bought, Amazon was now changing the way that books were read. The Kindle reader got a lot of publicity and it’s fair to say that e-book readers really took off with the launch of Amazon’s upgraded Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009.
In June of the same year, Amazon followed up with the large format Kindle DX. This sported a larger e-ink display screen and was aimed at readers of magazines, newspapers and academic textbooks. A good deal of the excitement regarding the new DX actually originated from the somewhat traditional world of academic publishing.
So, the way that books are bought, delivered and read have all been changed in a relatively short period of time. The last piece of the reading jigsaw – publishing – is also likely to change in the near future. Large publishing houses will certainly need to publish new editions in e-book format in future. The traditional cycle of hardback publication, followed a few months later by the paperback version will be modified by the addition of an e-book version right at the front end of the process.
Since publishing e-books is less costly than either hardback or paperback release publishing houses may be encouraged to be more daring in future. It could conceivably result in more new authors being published as the process will carry much less financial risk. It could prompt more authors to take greater control by self publishing. In fact, publishing Kindle books is, even now, an achievable goal for anyone who has an Amazon account and who can operate simple word processing software such as Microsoft Word. E-book readers are a very genuine revolution in reading (and writing).
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