Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels. “It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies president and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP.
Online retail giant Amazon has made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices, and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books. Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, according to the US Book Industry Study Group (BISG).
Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favourite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed. “The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,” said BISG deputy executive director Angela Bole.
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly wishing for lower device prices, according to the survey. Bajarin believes it will be at least a decade before print is obsolete. “For one thing, there is a generation of people above 45 who grew up with this reading format and for many this will remain the most comfortable way for them to consume content for quite a while,” he said.
“However, younger generations are already moving rapidly to digital representations of publications and, over time, they will be using e-books and tablets to consume all of their publications.” Newspapers spend a lot of money printing and distributing daily editions that can’t be kept as fresh as stories on the Internet. Meanwhile, advertising has been moving online where audiences can be better targeted and advertisers pay when people actually click on ads.
As if online competition weren’t enough for the print magazine business, the US Postal Service is proposing to do away with weekend deliveries in a move that could make weeklies seem like even older news by the time they arrive.
