Amazon's move to digital content makes perfect sense. The more it can focus on e-content, the more profitable it will be.
Electronic books, though, have a long way to go. What will probably be a bigger success in the near term is audiobooks. After announcing nearly two years ago that it would develop its own digital audiobooks store, Amazon said yesterday it would buy Audible.com, which has sold downloadable audiobooks for years.
It won't be long before most people in the U.S. have an MP3 player built into their cellphone. Whether they'll know it's there is another matter.
What's holding back e-books? The conventional wisdom is that the reading public isn't quite ready for them. But maybe the problem is simply that not enough people read anymore.
At least one famous tech guru has declared the Kindle "dead on arrival" -- none other than Apple's Steve Jobs.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Hey, what about the other 60 percent of us, Steve?
What's next? The New York Times' Bits column envisions a service allowing readers to seamlessly switch from a print book on an e-reader to listening to the same book while you're driving to work, then switching back to reading.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors
