It’s raining e-books

Quadrant is now available on iPad.

An Entire Library in Your Pocket

Over the past three years e-books have come from being a niche market of techno-nerds to a mass market already outselling print editions. Although still dismissed by many book lovers, the advantages of e-books are simply too compelling to deny.  

For readers they offer:

• Much lower cost
• Immediate purchase and delivery from anywhere with no shipping charges
• The ability to carry a whole library of thousands of different titles in your pocket with secure backup elsewhere
• Every title opens instantly on the page where it was last closed
• Bookmarks and personal notations can be made easily and non-destructively
• Instant dictionary access to any word by just touching it
• Read anywhere anytime without the need for room lighting or disturbing anyone
• Font styles and sizes are readily selectable to personal choice
• Screen lighting is easily adjustable, uniform and consistent
• Textbooks and reference works are starting to be available at big savings in cost and bulk 

The prices of e-book readers are already no more than the cost of two or three print titles and are still falling. Even better still, colour tablets with gamut, contrast, luminosity and resolution all better than print are already becoming available. 

For authors e-books offer:

• A much better royalty than print books (e.g. 70% vs. 10%)
• Never being out of print
• No need for dreadful promotion tours
• Your work is immediately accessible to a global market
• No rejections from opinionated publishers
• No need for an agent to find a publisher or to avoid being shafted by them 

For publishers e-books are:

• Simply an unmitigated disaster 

Publishers are rapidly being reduced to superfluous middlemen. Their only remaining value is their editorial function and that is now open to competition from independent editors without having to also support the overheads and profits of a big city publishing house. 

For myself as a reader, e-books have resulted in my buying about as many new books in the past year as I did print editions in total over the previous ten years. 

Source: And the good news is…