Wednesday, October 21, 2009

E-Book Fans Keep Format in Spotlight; New York Times, 10/21/09

Brad Stone, New York Times; E-Book Fans Keep Format in Spotlight:

"The publishing industry has been under a dark cloud recently.

Sales are down this year, despite prominent books by Dan Brown and Edward M. Kennedy. Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a war for e-commerce dominance, creating new worries among publishers and authors about dwindling profits.

But amid the gloom, some sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books.

Amazon for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.

“You are going to see very significant industry growth rates as a result of the convenience of this kind of reading,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/technology/21books.html?scp=1&sq=e-books&st=cse

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