FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY I published a blog post about "dirsuptions in publishing" and at that time I pushed the post forward five years so I could see whether my predictions were accurate.
Back in 2012, I was interested in what kinds of disruptions commissiong editor Eoin Purcell was seeing in the print industry. I brought my Kindle (at left) to the table and listened.
At the time, Random House, the USA's largest publisher, was getting 20% of its U.S. revenue from digital sales. Amazon was adding an author a week to its list of million sellers in Kindle e-book sales. Six of the top 20 titles on USA Today's Best-Selling Books list were e-books. Barnes and Noble was hoping that its Nook would keep the basic business afloat. And back on campus, we were teaching students how to create content with Adobe InDesign and Calibre recipes.
I made the soft prediction that students would like to have as many choices in reading formats as possible and that hard cover textbooks were less important than e-books whose pages they could print on demand. I thought that my young daughter would want to continue reading on her iPad and also with an e-ink device.
If my thoughts from 2012 ring true, then Mia Goldbach is now taking her e-books to bed with her, reading screens and listening to audio books. She's carrying digital content in her book bag, tapping into pages, annotating notes and sharing content. At least one of the titles in her go-to e-book reader has 30,000 words of content.
How did I do?
Bernie Goldbach curates links about the Kindle.
