Everything including music, video, and text is going digital these days. Right now we are taking part in the major shift from turning physical things to digital. Which begs the question, Could E-Books ever over take real books in the upcoming digital age?
New readers such as the Kindle from Amazon allow you to carry an entire bookcase worth of books in a small form-factor device. While it is great for the tech-junkie, not many people are going to buy a $500 device just to have to re-buy all of their favorite books. While I do believe that prices will drop considerably, right now in this economy, it is highly unlikely that we can see a major shift to people using digital book readers.
Now I will say that the concept and the market is there. We have already seen tremendous success with the Kindle and with the Amazon digital store. And, with Google taking part in the digital transition by scanning thousands of books in their project Google Books, we can expect just about every page from every major publisher to end up in digital format.
What Needs to Happen?
First, one critical change to the market needs to happen. Readers need to become available in retail stores with lower prices. This will allow anyone access to a digital reader and release it into the mainstream of everyday people. As time goes on, I believe this will happen naturally. But, for now, only rich techies will be willing to purchase a digital reader and all of their books again.
Secondly, publishers need to open up to this new market and allow their content to be digitized. In fact, this will probably bring them more profit as they will be able to eliminate the use of paper in the distribution of a book. Once again, I believe this will happen naturally as time goes on. As more and more publishers jump on the digital bandwagon, the movement to a completely digital world will gain momentum.
Third, we have to think of ways in which to improve screen quality so that people with bad or weak eyesight do not have problems reading digital screens. This will be the biggest hurdle to overcome as people will have to get used to reading off of a device instead of paper.
The Verdict
While all of us techies are all waiting for a complete digital age I do not think that we will not see a day in which digital books become more popular than physical books. There is simply not the need to transition to a completely digital world.
Once news and books become completely computerized, I will consider our society to be completely digitized. But I do not think this will happen until our cars fly and all of our counters are computers.
