In next 5 years magazine industry will loose 35% of its revenue but by 2020 the industry will recover because of digital delivery. By then industry will be changed completely and will be 58% digital, as opposed to 10% now. Digital will overtake magazine print by 2016 and this will make it easier to enter the market.

Book industry will continue to grow slowly through 2020. Digital will grow 36% in 2014 and end up at 60% by 2020. Revenues from digital will eventually surpass revenues from print and see many more small players as barriers to entry are removed. Ereaders in use: 2010 15m unit installed base forecast, by 2020 861 million installed base. Unit prices of ereaders will fall to under $100 by 2015 and this is when the market will really take off. Expect this price point to be reached for all forms of ereaders. In 2020 expect to spend $80/ereader for digital content per year.

iPad will run parallel to current market for ereaders and not damage it much because they both serve different needs. Microsoft is not in this market currently and the market has moved so fast that they have no place in it in the future.

Expect prices to drop to $50 by 2020. Color display technology development will be especially important and will replace black and white displays by 2015 and by 2020 95% of all displays will be color. Flexible displays will replace rigid displays and will allow the reader to be rolled or folded. Will fall into 3 categories: rigid displays; bendable displays, which will be seen this year; rollable and foldable displays, and will take 7% of the market by 2020. 30% ereaders will use multiple wireless communication technologies. Ereaders will begin to communicate among themselves as well as to content systems. Input technology will move to multi-touch display and expect it to be standard interface by 2020.

Content formats will change. Currently have 38 different content formats. Main battle will be between PDF, xml based and Flash. By 2020 all the formats will be xml based. Current epaper displays will be phased out. Expect reader sales to reach 25 billion in 2020. By 2012 will diverge into a family of ereader prices with different designs and displays depending on content requirements. Will be 4 categories: rollable and foldable, under 9″ size; conventional ebook ereader with display under 9″; newspaper ereaders with large monochrome displays and will be used for paper replacement of all types and have monochrome displays; magazine reader with an over 9″ color display. These won’t appear until 2013 with bendable displays and after this introduction by 2015 they will overtake other displays and will dominate the market by 2020. So by 2015 the multiple classes of ereaders will start to converge again. Current iPad not designed for ereading and it is an afterthought: poor battery life, poor display in sunlight, heavy and fragile displays. The dedicated ereader will probably disappear and will be replaced by a tablet based portable computer that is also suitable for ereading.

Display technology: expects current eink technology will fall away because of color and speed problems. Qualcomm technology is highly promising but are limited in size. Need both color and flexibility and feels that Liquavista offers the best option for the future because of its video speed, high quality color and flexibility.

According to Lagardere, e-book sales in December in the U.S. were $5 million, a total that surpassed e-book sales for all of 2008. E-book sales represented 3% of full year sales at HBG USA in 2009.

За месяц как за весь предыдущий год. 3%

Nearly 90% of commmercial academic publishers have seen growth in e-book sales over the past two years, according to a cross-sector survey released today (10th March) by the Association of Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers. Growth in some cases was more than 1,000%, with e-book sales now almost 10% of total book sales of the publishers surveyed.

Любопытная статистика по научным и университетским издательствам в Англии. Кажется, здесь экспансия электронных книг идёт быстрее, чем в остальныхсеткорах рынка. QED

Pixel Qi will offer DIY kits towards the end of Q2. Yeah, you’ll be able to turn your laptop/netbook display into a Pixel Qi display yourself! They say it’s rather easy: “It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbuld: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation“.

Забавный способ продвижения.

Вы их читаете, а они следят за тем, как вы это делаете и меняются в зависимости от этого.
Via Buzz by Max Nemtsov

Рады сообщить, что портал об электронных книгах epubBooks.ru локализовал add-on EPUBReader для браузера Firefox. Теперь каждый владелец Firefox (а это ни много ни мало 15,39 % посетителей сайта) сможет пользоваться этой онлайн читалкой книг в формате epub на русском языке начиная со следующего обновления аддона!

Для тех, кто пока по каким-то причинам не знает, сообщаем, что add-on EPUBReader позволяет читать книги в формате epub прямо в Вашем браузере Firefox. Что для этого надо сделать:
– зайдите на сайт EPUBReader и нажмите на кнопку “Add to Firefox” (или сделайте это прямо с этой страницы);
– открывайте наш каталог и читайте любую книгу прямо в браузере.

Плагин тестировал – работает неплохо.

Точка зрения дизайнера. Весьма взвешенная и позитивная.

Increasingly, authors and publishers are freely distributing their books electronically to increase the visibility of their work. A vital question for those with a commercial stake in selling books is, “What happens to book sales if digital versions are given away?” We used BookScan sales data for four categories of books (a total of 41 books) for which we could identify the date when the free digital versions of the books were made available to determine whether the free version affected print sales. We analyzed the data on book sales for the eight weeks before and after the free versions were available. Three of the four categories of books had increased sales after the free books were distributed. We discuss the implications and limitations of these results.

Вполне нормальные и разумные требования, не правда ли? Многие из них реализованы в разных странах мира, например свобода панорамы или свободные лицензии. Однако очень скоро последовала реакция нашей «творческой элиты».

Описывается она тут. Журналист, писавший её проявил просто чудеса неангажированности.

Подробный разбор полётов.