The Commerce Times

The e-reader revolution

The Kindle, the Nook, the Kobo.  E -readers: it doesn’t matter what you call them, these hand-held devices are changing the way the world views their books – literally.

“At Indigo, we know that the book retail industry is evolving rapidly and believe that the next five years will result in approximately a 10 per cent shift to e-books,” said Lisa Huie, the Public Relations Manager at Indigo Books & Music Inc.

E-readers allow fans of the written word to download their favourite novels, latest magazine issues and newspapers to a compact, lightweight device resembling an oversized Palm Pilot. But do not be deceived by its size; this handheld device can hold up to 1,500 digital copies of e-books and magazines.

The world was first introduced to the e-reader in November 2007 after three years of development by Amazon.com. The Kindle is a featherweight e-reader with a price tag of $259. Kindle supporters believe its seamlessly sleek design, free wireless capabilities and two-week battery life are worth the money. So does Amazon.

Although profits were slow at first, Amazon saw a boom in the last quarter of 2009 generating a 62 per cent leap in net profits, bringing their total sales to over $5 billion, a feat that many thought next to impossible a few years back.

“Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars – not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.com,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon in a press release.

Bookstores across North America have opened their eyes to the new phenomenon and have added the option of the e-book to most of their online websites. Chapters Indigo, for example, recently added a new e-book section to their website.

“E-book content sales are up 176 per cent in 2009 and in 2010 are expected to top $500 million in the U.S. alone,” said Huie.

It seems that the public has begun to trade in paperback for paperless with ease and educational institutions are noticing.

Major textbook publishers like Pearson, Wiley and Cengage Learning collaborated with Amazon in the summer of 2009 and have already begun pilot programs in six universities in the United States. Among them are Arizona State, University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and Princeton.

The trend is growing in the U.S and has spread to Canada. According to Publishers Weekly, Blyth Academy in Toronto has collaborated with Sony to become the first high school in Canada to provide its students with e-readers as a part of their school materials. Aside from digital textbooks, students of Blyth Academy have their personal timetables, a syllabus for each class, information on applying to universities and lecture notes from of their teachers all at their fingertips.

The introduction of the e-readers to an educational environment could potentially replace textbooks and course packs, thus, drastically reducing textbook costs for students. But at what price to the students’ learning habits?

“I really like to make marks in my textbooks, underline good facts, pick out good quotes and I wouldn’t be able to do that on the e-reader,” said Emily Neilson, a third-year international studies student at York University.

“The potential money saved isn’t worth changing how I study.”

The e-book option is also available for Ryerson students at the Ryerson bookstore website. Here, students can download classic tittles from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. With the e-book option popping up everywhere including at a campus near you, could this be the end of paperback and hard cover books as we know it?

“While we don’t believe people will stop reading physical books, we do know that people want a choice of how they’re reading,” said Huie.

Not every student is willing to download books the way they do music. The connection between the reader and the book itself is nostalgic and hard to let go of.

“Sure, the money saved is good, but I feel like I’d be missing something, “said Dionne Wilson, a first-year journalism student at Ryerson University. “I like holding the book in my hand, I like turning the pages.”