Kindle Saves Book Industry and Reading in the 21st Century
By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-30 10:57:25 | Word Count: 664
The Kindle 3 is now officially Amazon’s ALL TIME BESTSELLER, outranking sales of even the last Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.
This stunning success of what was once considered an esoteric device only available through a single source came on the heels of news this morning that its official leather case was causing some Kindle devices to crash.
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Nevertheless, Amazon responded that it was taking the complaints about crashes seriously and stated that the metal hooks inside the official leather cover that are used to connect to the device is the culprit. The Kindle 3 itself is operating flawlessly. Ironically, users who bought other covers experienced no problems.
However, despite this hiccup—which was silenced across the Web in a matter of hours—the fact that the e-reader outsold a book from an amazingly popular series is perhaps a clue that the trend towards e-books is looking up.
For years the publishing industry has bemoaned the decline of reading among the public. That fact, in combination with depression era business practices that allows booksellers to return any product that doesn’t sell—no questions asked—has led many to fear the demise of the whole book publishing industry (and the demise of Western civilization along with it).
The cost of printing, shipping, transporting and recycling returned books have taken its toll on publishers, independent book stores (who largely have not survived) and authors. Unless you are President Barack Obama or Glen Beck, the days of high advances (for authors) and guaranteed profits (for publishers) have been long gone.
However, the tech savvy generation who grew up learning to text before they said mama have been telling worried old fogies in Universities and Publishing houses that they aren’t reading less at all; they’re just not making trips to the library anymore.
While it’s true that there is so much trash on the internet that those predicting the demise of reading can say that today’s young aren’t reading literature on the Web, the fact is, this was always true in the heyday of printing as well. Trash always outnumbered great fiction and high quality non-fiction. Nothing’s changed but the format people!
The kindle’s success is proof that people are not reading less, they’re just reading differently. The incredible fact that the device is a one trick pony with no fancy colors or graphics is also telling. It is holding its own against tablets like Apple’s iPad.
The best news is that the e-Book market, which had been struggling for years but has recently been showing some market gains, is now positioned to literally take off in flight.
E-Books are cheaper for publishers to produce because they require less steps for production, they don’t cost anything to ship, they don’t use up the earth’s natural resources in terms of trees and fuel, they bring higher profit margins, they bring higher royalties for authors, they don’t require a warehouse to store them, refunds don’t jump back to the publishing house and they are even more portable than regular books because of how they can be bought and sold.
The best part is that publishers and booksellers won’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity when they choose what to “stock”. Countless little high fiction tomes have been turned down because they naturally don’t have the mass appeal that coffee books have. So the public (and creativity) loses out to the economics of bookselling; you never even had the chance to read the next country’s next Mark Twain.
However, thanks to the public’s support of Kindle, due to its reduced price point, its exceptionally long battery life and the fact that you don’t have to purchase an extra service to buy or read books on it, reading can no longer be considered dead. Hooray for technology!
