The author of the best selling children's book "The Gruffalo" (Julia Donaldson), has announced that she does not want to turn her stories into eBooks because the electronic devices distract children from what they are reading. This shows that there is still a lot of hostility towards eBooks.
However, JK Rowling, the author of the bestselling "Harry Potter" series, has contrastingly said that the aforementioned series would be allowed to be published as Ebooks. This is a sudden change of stance on Ebooks, which at first she, like Julia Donaldson, had scorned. This shows that although many people now are not fans of Ebooks, their opinions might be rapidly changing.
In the wake of book stores "Angus and Robertson" and "Borders" collapsing, e-books have suddenly become more popular, with eBook retailer Kobo announcing a 30% increase in their site traffic. This shows that e - books are perhaps taking advantage of money shortages in the book industry to increase their sales dramatically, and are perhaps the reason for the bankruptcy of the the two above stores (excepting of course Kobo.)
Lendle, the online eBook lending service, has been killed off by Amazon in an attempt to further increase e -books sales by the latter. This shows that Amazon, who owns the rights to the Amazon Kindle, can get very protective of its eBooks.
The policy of libraries and eBooks (that, like with a normal book, once it is brought, it is forever owned by the library), has now been changed by the publishing firm "Harper Collins." Now, once the eBooks have been taken out a certain number of times, the library has to pay a renewal fee to the publishers. This shows that publishers are realising the importance of eBooks, and so are trying to milk as much money as possible from them.
Some publisher now wish to add more to Ebooks; instead of just copying the text and digitalizing it, they would also add audio and video to it. This could have an up side; for example, as stated by Shane Richmond of the Daily Telegraph, you could read a music theory book, and it would be made so much easier by the music being discussed right there on the page. However, there is another school of thought (which I personally agree with) saying that it would simply just not be a book anymore. Either way really, I don't just see why you don't just buy an audio - book!
Marc Parrish, the executive of American book company "Barnes & Noble", has recently said in a conference that e - book sales were, perhaps in the next 24 months, goiung to overtake normal book sales completely. This shows that some experts of the publishing and book industries share the view that Ebooks will soon overtake normal book sales. This comes with the news that America's Ebook sales have doubled whilst normal book sales have plummeted.
References: http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=books+and+Ebooks
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