And while paperbacks continue to lead with $299.8 million in revenue — they is some decline. Last year they were at $335 million. In fact, most of the converts to e-readers come not from hardcover readers but from softcover. Nevertheless, softcover remains the dominant medium, for those who want to continually use a book, and not merely to own it, such as is sometimes the case with an expensive hardcover, or dismiss it, as is common with e-books when they are finished.
The e-reader market is booming in tandem with the popularity of such e-readers as Barnes and Nobles Nook and Amazon’s Kindle, the Ipad and Sony’s e-reader. The convenience of purchasing a book from online and getting it instantly, as opposed to the torturous wait for snail mail delivery, or the frustration of visiting a book store that doesn’t have what you want, has made e-readers the latest craze. And this is so despite the Digital Rights Management on some literature files and the difficulty in sharing a good book with a friend the old fashioned way.
It is also a boon for self-published authors who haven’t convinced a publisher to front the cost of printing an edition of their work: self-publishing is free and venues such as Barnes and Nobles online and Amazon in fact have programs to allow self-published authors to make their books available to a worldwide public — for free.
