Introduction
The e-book is a digitized version of a book, meant to be read on a computer, e-reader, tablet, or smartphone. Many of the best-selling e-book titles are digital versions of popular print books without any significant structural changes from the print form, but some also introduce animation, video, hypertext, and social networking into the reading process. In addition to major titles, self-published books also play an important role in the e-book market. The goal of the e-book is to provide the ability to read books through an onscreen interface rather than on paper.
In the communication ecosystem perspective, the text and images of the e-book are the content. Just as in printed books and periodicals, what is written is the message being communicated. What e-book technology brings us is a new way to distribute and consume the message. The ability to read e-books is driven by software that allows devices to display the books properly and hardware developed specifically for e-reading.
The most important hardware for the original diffusion of e-books is the e-reader (Rainie, Zickuhr, Purcell, Madden, & Brenner, 2012). These are lightweight, handheld devices designed specifically for reading e-books and other digital text, such as newspapers and magazines. Unlike computers, many of which are stationary or heavy to carry, and some books, which can be bulky and heavy, e-readers can hold libraries of thousands of books and only weigh half a pound. E-readers also offer the ability to download new content at any time of the day and anywhere one can connect to a computer or the Internet.
Though key to the original e-book market, e-readers are not necessary to read an e-book and many e-book users read on computer, tablet, and smartphone screens. Unlike a print book, which can be read without special devices, an e-book is entirely dependent upon the user having a computer, tablet, mobile device, or a specialized e-reader to access the content.
Background
The original development of the e-book pre-dates the e-reader, and the wide diffusion of e-books, by about 20 years. Michael Hart, widely considered to be the father of the e-book, began Project Gutenberg, a digital book library, in 1971, in an attempt to catalogue and make accessible all human knowledge (Project Gutenberg, n.d.). For 20 years, the e-book continued being developed without any specialized reader and was only used by the small number of people who had access to a computer.
By the 1980s, an infrastructure of personal computers was in place that could enable a large number of individuals to read e-books using their personal computers, but the e-book did not become popular. The spread of e-books would be limited until a large-scale diffusion of personal computers, the Internet, and online retailing created the right environment.
The first portable e-reader was introduced in the early 1990s. Sony’s Data Discman used the compact disc as a method of storing data, which allowed for reading books without a bulky hard drive (Hoffelder, 2011). The Data Discman was similar to a portable gaming system—it accessed information from miniature CDs and displayed the information on a screen. Although primitive compared to current e-readers, it is easy to see the origins of current designs when looking at the first Data Discman. Sony continued to develop the Discman until the end of the decade, but it was never widely adopted (Hoffelder, 2011). From the creation of the first e-reader, it would take another 17 years before one was introduced to the public market that became popular.
Data Discman
Source: Peter Harris (Creative Commons Photo)
One of the biggest technological advances in e-readers was the development of electronic ink (E Ink). A spin-off of MIT’s Media Lab, E Ink Corporation combined chemistry, physics, and electronics to create electronic ink which, when used in an e-reader or tablet, is so paper-like it can fool the reader’s eye. Electronic ink is really millions of small capsules, each containing black and white particles. A device such as an e-reader sends an electric charge to each capsule making it appear either black or white thus forming words or images on the screen; in color E-ink, the black and white capsules appear under a color filter (Carmody, 2010).
Sony again led the market in 2006, when it offered the Sony Reader, the first e-reader to offer an E Ink display. Unlike a normal backlit computer screen, E Ink screens behave more like normal paper and require external light to be read, making the experience much more like reading a paper book. Even with this advance, it was not until Amazon entered the scene the following year that the e-reader took off (Rainie et al., 2012).
Amazon, the online retailer that began as a book store and remains primarily invested in book sales, released the Kindle Reader in 2007, just in time for the holiday season. The release marked the first time that an e-reader was a popular success (Patel, 2007). The Kindle was not markedly different from the Sony Reader; the primary difference that allowed the Kindle to be successful was the existence of a company that already sold many books through online interactions. Though the public at large did not warm immediately to the e-reader, Amazon’s customers had been primed for the e-book by purchasing books online and reading onscreen text for years (Kozlowski, 2010). Amazon had a large enough reading customer base that, unlike Sony, they had a target audience that was easy to advertise to through their normal, day-to-day sales.
Sony’s failure and Amazon’s success are an excellent example of the importance of the pre-diffusion theory discussed in Chapter 4. While Sony’s focus and expertise was producing and distributing hardware, Amazon had expertise in distributing both hardware and software, making it much easier for the Kindle to achieve the diffusion threshold.
With the Kindle came something new for e-books: specialized formatting for different devices. Before the Kindle, e-books were in universal formats such as PDF or plain text, but with the release of the Kindle, Amazon introduced a proprietary format that can only be read through the correct kind of device or software. Barnes & Noble’s Nook followed in 2009 with a format that could not be read on the Kindle. Finally, setting the stage for the current e-reader marketplace, Apple released its iPad tablet in 2010. The iPad, like a computer, allows the reader to access both Kindle and Nook formats, but it also enables readers to download proprietary e-books from Apple’s iBookstore that cannot be read on the other machines.
The iPad is a tablet computer that has many functions, only one of which is the ability to read e-books. In fact, the iPad is much more similar to a laptop than to an e-reader in every way except that it is much lighter than a laptop (Buchanan, 2010). The iPad lacks the E Ink display, so the reading experience is much more like reading on a computer (Reardon, 2011). Nevertheless, the iPad altered the landscape of the e-reader marketplace by introducing more functionality to a device that has almost all of the benefits of an e-reader.
The iPad was a game changer. Amazon and Barnes & Noble realized that they needed to keep pace by offering consumers a product that had at least some of the advanced capabilities of the iPad. The race for larger screens, email, and Web browsing on e-readers began, and soon both companies offered tablets (Kendrick, 2012). Before the 2011 holiday season, Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, and Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook Tablet. Both of these devices offered capabilities similar to those of the iPad, despite coming from the lineage of their E ink, book-reading based predecessors (Reardon, 2011).
With Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Apple all having significant online retail experience and the improvements in bandwidth making downloading e-books a simple and fast process, consumers have almost immediate access to any content they want. Early adopters of the e-reader had to download an e-book to their computer before they could transfer it to their e-reader, but e-readers now have Wi-Fi and 3G/4G broadband access, which allows consumers to search for, buy, download, and read e-books no matter where they may be (Enderle, 2012).
The success of the iPad and other tablets in the e-book market has helped establish what will likely be the most important hardware for the future of e-books. Smartphones have become a major part of e-reading as consumers have accustomed themselves to reading on tablet screens, often in the same operating system as their smartphone, and smartphones have developed more storage, longer battery lives, and better and larger screens (Maloney, 2015). The ownership of smartphones far outpaces that of e-readers and tablets and has created a much larger potential audience for e-books (Anderson, 2015).
Recent Developments
E-readers
Though partly responsible for the rise of the e-book’s popularity, e-reader sales have plummeted even as e-book sales have grown (Maloney, 2015). The dedicated e-reader has struggled to stay relevant, and lack of innovation has given users little reason to upgrade from older models. Barnes & Noble has been forced out of the e-reader market in the UK and it seems likely that they will soon stop production of the Nook entirely (Williams, 2016).
Although Amazon continues to release slightly improved Kindle models, their focus has become their tablet, the Kindle Fire. In late 2015, they introduced a Fire model that they sold for $50, a lower price than their E Ink dedicated e-readers and meant to serve not only Kindle e-books, but also Amazon Prime’s video service (Mackintosh, 2015).
The focus on tablets notwithstanding, smartphones are democratizing the availability of e-books. As of December 2014, 54% of e-book buyers had used smartphones to read e-books, a number that has only grown since. The growing popularity of larger displays in Apple and Android phones has also helped spur the move to the smartphone as an e-reader. After the introduction of the iPhone 6, 45% of e-books downloaded from iBook were to phones, a massive jump from only 28% before (Maloney, 2015).
Format
Given the increasing use of tablets and smartphones as reading devices, the apps that connect phones to their reading libraries have become more important than the dedicated e-reader. To both promote and popularize their formats, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other device manufacturers have created free apps for the major smartphone operating systems that allow you to use your phone as an e-reader. So, a tablet or a smart phone can give a reader access to Kindle, Nook, and iBook purchases and formats, eliminating at least some of the challenges of the lack of e-book format standardization. Still, the mixed format issues are a large part of why the Nook is failing and why it is possible for one e-book ecosystem, Amazon’s, to maintain market dominance.
When Michael Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971, his desire was to provide 99% of the public with access to free or very low-cost versions of books and documents that were already in the public domain. His goal was to select texts that would be of interest to the general public and make those texts accessible, readable and searchable on 99% of the hardware that anyone, anywhere might run (Hart, 1992). Making those texts available to the largest possible number of users was accomplished by selecting a ubiquitous format that ran on every computer and operating system, from DOS and Apple to UNIX and mainframe computers: plain ASCII text.
As e-books became a venture for publishers and booksellers, the formats for accessing the content became less universal. In addition to the various devices which are used for reading e-books, the various formats have fragmented e-book consumers into groups that own a particular device and buy content from the supplier(s) that delivers content readable on that device.
To see the hodgepodge of formats, see Table 14.1.
All readers support PDF files, which might identify this as a possible universal format, but PDF does not allow many of the benefits of the e-reader, including resizing and searching the text; it just shows up as an image. Almost all of the platforms support the EPUB format, the closest to a universal format that is offered, but the largest of the suppliers, Amazon, does not support this standard. Although there have been some attempts and pressure to create a universal standard, none is forthcoming (Lee, Guttenberg & McCrary, 2002).
This forcing of formats onto users is a matter of convenience and cost (Schofield, 2010). It is convenient for a reader to stay with one supplier of content because switching to another supplier would mean switching to another e-reader and either converting original files to a format readable by the new device or in some cases having to repurchase entire libraries of books, which dramatically increases the cost beyond the initial reinvestment in new hardware. Even if a reader buys an e-reader or tablet that has the capability of accessing content from the different suppliers through apps, there is the inconvenience of switching between apps to view desired e-book and an inability to easily search across an entire library of e-books.
Different E-reader Formats
*Through conversion **Using Apps
Source: Technology Futures, Inc. Data: (BookFinder.com, n.d.)
It seems, however, that the war of the e-readers is essentially over. The clear winners are smartphones and tablets, because of their convenience and multi-functionality. Although the Kindle and other E Ink devices continue to hold onto a niche market, the death of the Nook in the UK makes it clear that the future is in other kinds of devices (Williams, 2016). The question is whether dedicated e-readers will even exist in a decade and whether E Ink will play any part at all. Amazon’s own introduction of the $50 Fire, which is cheaper than the E Ink Kindle, shows that e-readers are becoming irrelevant.
Subscription Services
The major area of flux since 2015 has been in subscription services. In 2015, Scribd partnered with Marvel Comics, Harlequin, and major audiobook producers to provide access for their subscribers. They were forced to limit access to the romance books because romance readers were reading too many a month. Likewise, they were forced to limit the number of audiobooks users could access a month to only one, with each additional audiobook costing the same as the monthly subscription fee (Hoffelder, 2015).
Scribd survived the year relatively unscathed compared to other subscription services like Oyster and Entitle. All three services paid publishers full retail price for each book downloaded, a model that proved unsustainable. Entitle shuttered in July of 2015. Oyster was purchased by Google and was shut down in January of 2016 (Albanese & Milliot, 2015).
Big Five Publishers Share of E-Book Market is Shrinking
Source: “September 2015 Author Earnings Report,” 2015
Amazon’s marketshare and the books they acquire cheaply through publishing within the Amazon ecosystem allows it to undercut the prices of other e-booksellers. Given the closure and tightening of other e-booksellers, the future of subscription services is unclear even as publishing seems to think this is the direction the market should take. It is likely that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service will lead the market, simply because no one else can afford to participate on equal footing.
Equally important is the future of independent and Amazon e-book publishing as distinct from mainstream publishing. As the large publishers have increased the price of e-books, their share of the market has decreased. Print sales hold steady, but the Big Five and small to medium size publishers now make up a minority of e-book sales see Figure 14.1 (September 2015 Author Earnings Report, 2015).
Current Status
74% of e-books sold sold in 2015 were purchased from Amazon (“October 2015,” 2015). More than 54 million Americans are members of Amazon Prime, and these members are worth about $1,100 a year each to Amazon (Mackintosh, 2016). The Apple iBookstore has the second largest market share, with only 11% of the total volume, with the Nook, Kobo, and Google-Play all falling well behind (“October 2015,” 2015).
E-books still are a minority of book sales and books read. 72% of Americans read a book in 2015, 63% of Americans read a book in print and 27% read an e-book (Rainie & Perrin, 2015). This means less than 10% of Americans are reading e-books exclusively, so the majority of readers remain either print only or a mix of print and e-book. Only 19% of Americans had dedicated e-readers in 2015, down from 32% in 2011(Anderson, 2015).
54% of those e-book readers have read a book on their phone (Maloney, 2015). More Kindle app books are read on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus than on any other iOS device, including iPads (Maloney, 2015). Before it shuttered, 55% of Oyster’s reading activity was on smartphones (Maloney, 2015).
E-books are also popular in libraries. Overdrive reports that more than 169 million e-books were borrowed in 2015, which is a 24% increase over 2014 (Berkowitz, 2016).
E-books are also playing a major role in education. One third of K-12 instructional materials budget is for digital content, and 80% of schools are using digital content in the classroom (Kozlowski, 2016; Maughan, 2015). New York City public schools, which serve over a million students, signed a $30 million deal with Amazon in April 2016 to bring e-books to their students (Brueck, 2016). At the University level, students and professors have mixed feelings about incorporating e-books into study, but digital resources are a key part of research practices and library holdings (Cassidy et al., 2014; Corlett-Rivera & Hackman, 2014). The lower cost of electronic publication allows academic libraries to significantly expand their content and get content to borrowers more quickly (Durant & Horava, 2015; LaMagna, Hartman-Caverly, & Danowitz, 2015). However, the growth of the e-book in has been less extreme than expected only a few short years ago. In 2015, the ALIA predicted that digital library holdings will plateau at 20% of all library holdings, down from their prediction of 50% just two years earlier (ALIA, 2015).
Factors to Watch
Although subscription services are a boon to readers, it is unclear how they will impact authors. For independent writers, it could help grow their audience, but will likely also reduce their revenue. The landscape is only becoming more competitive for authors, as e-books do not disappear from the market over time like print books. E-books priced even as low as $2.99 will feel expensive compared to the $9.99 monthly Kindle Unlimited price, meaning authors will have little choice but to accept whatever Kindle Unlimited is willing to pay them.
Kindle’s ability to sync audiobooks and e-books and the move to smartphones and tables suggests a future with more complex multimedia books, but growth in this area is limited by how much more expensive audiobooks and other media are. Scribd’s relationship with Marvel, which allows users to subscribe both to books and comics, also shows increasing merging of different genres of reading (Mlot, 2015). It will be interesting to see how subscription services manage access to products. The romance genre alone seems to be able to put subscription services in the red, because romance readers consume more books than their monthly fee can cover. Can subscription services afford to offer access to audiobooks, comics, and other multimedia?
The huge growth in the number of titles published shows no signs of slowing, meaning that the availability of content is going to be overwhelming. Consumers need better ways of sorting through all of the available content to be able to find what we are looking for. There has been a lot of progress in terms of matching content to consumers through sites such as Netflix and YouTube, which have always had an enormous amount of content, and undoubtedly the online system needs to get better at finding books for people.
The biggest question is whether anything can be done to break Amazon’s stranglehold on the e-book market and whether competition from other companies can have an impact. Apple’s ability to challenge Amazon was limited when Apple lost an anti-trust case regarding price-fixing in the e-book market in 2016. This loss suggests that Amazon’s dominance is unlikely to be challenged in the near-term (Hurley, 2016). This currently is good news for consumers, who have access to more and cheaper books than ever before, but seems to be neutral to negative for publishers and authors.
Getting a Job
For students interested in e-book technology, there are several avenues to getting involved. The easiest way is to write original content and self-publish it. Self-publishing is available to anyone with a computer and something to publish. There is work in “translating” print publications into e-book format. Programmers are needed to develop the software that is used to read, format, and sell e-books. Algorithms need to be developed to help match readers to content that they will enjoy. Academia needs strong voices pushing for the development and inclusion of multimedia texts for students. Publishing houses need people to find good content for the publishers to pursue and sell. As the e-book industry grows, people with technical, writing, and content development skills will be in demand.
Projecting the Future
Two big changes are facing the e-book—the development of new formatting and the change of devices on which they are read. By 2031, all personal computing will likely be centered around a smartphone-like device. This single personal device can function as a phone, tablet, or computer, depending on the need. The screen can unfold and stretch, making it as portable and easy to glance at as your smartphone currently is, but easily becoming large enough to easily read a book or watch a video. Dedicated e-readers, tablets, and personal computers will be obsolete.
The biggest change will be in formatting. The line between book and multimedia will blur and more works will be published as digitally native. Textbooks will include videos, music, images, and interactive tutorials and quizzes. Picture books will be able to read themselves to children and include animation of their favorite characters. The distinction between novels, graphic novels, movies, and video games will also become less clear. Not only will audiobooks be synced to your e books, but movies, animation, and other visuals will be as well.
E-books will move towards subscription models where most content is easily available for use by paying a flat monthly fee. Bestsellers and new releases will still be easy to buy and more expensive, but services like Kindle Unlimited will become the norm. Subscription revenue could help self-published authors by allowing readers to experience their books without worrying about the individual cost of the book. Academic publishing will likely by slowest to change, but academic presses will need to move more fully online and offer better general availability at lower prices.
New software will be developed both for the adaptive display of e-books and for self-publishing authors to be able to do this formatting on their own. More print books will be dependent on being printed to order, either online or in person. Services like the Espresso Book Machine, which makes paperback books onsite at places like libraries and bookstores, will become more common and easy to use.
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