Electronic books, also referred to as e-books, have grown in popularity with the development of electronic readers including the Sony Reader, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s upcoming Nook. According to the Association of American Publishers, the sales of electronic books has increased by 68.4 percent in 2008, and in 2009 sales have since jumped 177 percent to $96.6 million. Although e-books only comprise 1.5 percent of the overall publishing industry, the increase in popularity presents a shift in the way books are being read.
As a result of the increase in the sales of electronic books, the present business model for this medium is in the midst of changing. Therefore, the intersection of copyright, commerce, and culture for e-books provides a critical perspective of how digital forms are beginning to alter how people consume media. Project Gutenberg is a program that allows for users to download over 30,000 e-books to their laptops, e-readers, or iPhones for free. This project allows for the spread of those books in the public domain to be freely available to mass society in an electronic form that is easily downloaded.
In order to compete with this new business model, established businesses such as Amazon, Sony, and Barnes & Noble are developing their own forms of e-readers to hold e-books. Over 5,400 public libraries across the country are also turning to an electronic model to rent out books through the format known as ePub, allowing users to download books for 14 days from compatible libraries. The iPhone also has a free application called Stanza that allows users to download e-books into PDF format on their phones, and the e-book community Wattpad allows users to download e-books to hundreds of models of phones. Convenience and transportability have become two key characteristics in the spread of e-book culture.
The electronic book market has its fair share of limitations that prevent some of the freedoms that a physical book provides consumers. Digital rights management places restrictions on content purchased from Amazon so that users can only download it to Kindle e-readers. The landmark case, Tasini et al v The New York Times, involved the National Writers Union suing The New York Times Company for violations of the copyrights of freelance writers. The New York Times Company was selling freelance articles to LexisNexis without proper compensation to authors. The court ruled that electronic rights were part of a writer’s copyrights.
Electronic publishing has also brought to light the lack of tangibility of e-books. Amazon rescinded specific electronic editions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm in July 2009. Even though consumers had legally paid for the electronic books, Amazon remotely removed the books from people’s Kindle due to a problem with the source’s rights to these books. This highlights a major difference with physical books. Once people buy physical books, they have all rights to the books that cannot be taken away as Amazon did with the e-books.
As a new source for digital information, e-books also face some of the problems that came with the popularity of digital MP3 players and iPods. With the growing number of e-books, a new type of piracy comes into play with websites, such as the site RapidShare, which allow users to upload e-books to a file-hosting website. RapidShare follows a similar model of MP3 networks such as LimeWire and Napster where music is downloaded for free among users. As new media forms popularize, ways to circumvent paying for the media also develop.
The future of e-books remains unclear. Senior analyst Sarah Rotman Epps for Forrester Research believes that e-book popularity will resemble the slower business cycle of the digital camera rather than the instant revolution of the iPod. Epps suggest that the popularity of e-readers and e-books will steadily grow over the years, not instantaneously revolutionizing how people read books. Current models of the e-book industry have trends increasing over the years as the price point of e-readers lowers, content increases, and unique features become more complex.
Regardless of the future for e-books, they are at the center of a changing digital community that relies on electronic mediums. As a result, copyright legislation and digital rights management are altered in order to include e-books as part of the business market. Because this generation is so heavily influenced by the Internet, how we consume media reflects this change to electronic books and our reliance on digital mediums of media. It will be interesting to see if this reliance on digital forms overshadows people’s nostalgia for physically flipping through pages rather than mimicking the action with a simple slide of the finger.
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http://www.tbiresearch.com/e-readers-should-drive-profits-for-both-distributors-and-book-publishers-2009-11
Above is the link to an article that explains why companies such as Amazon are losing money on each e-book sold. There is a great chart that estimates profits between print and digital copies of books. A lowering of wholesale prices and author royalties based on consumer-driven prices seems to be the likely transition for electronic publishing in order to be a viable business model for the future.