The iPad & The Kindle: Revolutionizing Communications And Reading Habits

24/05/2011

Digital communications have witnessed a relatively new phenomenon over the last year – the advent of e-readers such as the Kindle and the iPad. Allan Biggar, Chairman of All About Brands, looks at how business – and not the Facebook generation – which has led the game in online publishing.

Recently, the UK Publishers Association reported that there has been a significant increase in the sale of e-books, highlighting the growing popularity of digital readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad.

According to the trade body, digital books jumped by 20% to £180m in 2010. In a year, when...

...book sales totaled £3.1bn, the digital book sector remains relatively small, but the trajectory is clear.

Academic and business publishing embraced digital platforms over a decade ago and continues to lead the field. Company reports and academic journals are specialist materials but the advent of new technology is putting e-reading devices into consumers' hands and that is clearly driving growth in both sales of technology and content.

Publisher Penguin which publishes celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Jamie Oliver, recently said e-book revenues were up 182% year on year and account for about 6%, or £63m, of their global revenues. So the publishing house that revolutionized the industry in the 1930s with its inexpensive paperback books, is now at the forefront of pushing books into the digital world.

The good news for customers is that, in the long term, digital books should remove costs of printing in the way that Penguin challenged the traditional norms of publishing 80 years ago.

Interestingly, in a world dominated by social media fuelled by the Facebook generation, it is business (along with academia) which has been ahead of the game in an online publishing. Take the example of company reports which many of us... continued on page two >

 

 

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