The development of books has gone through three eras: the first is the geotechnical era, in which the text carriers include stones, clay tablets, pottery tablets, etc., such as petroglyphs from all over the world, and clay tablets from Sumer and Assyria; The second is the era of animals and plants. At this stage, the text carriers include turtle shells, sheepskin, bamboo, bark, and grass. The specific forms of books include Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, bamboo slips, ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls, and Indian birch bark books. , parchment books in the ancient Roman period, etc.; the third is the paper age, the form developed from the medieval booklet to the modern printed book, that is, the paper book (P-book) that is often read now. Throughout the historical development of books, rock paintings were replaced by clay tablets, which gave way to animal and plant leather books, and the emergence of paper made printed books occupy the mainstream, and every new development eliminated the former. So will the up-and-coming e-books (P-books) make people give up paper books?
P-book in the eyes of readers
At present, e-books have many advantages compared with traditional books: First, it is a green and environmentally friendly product, which saves tree energy, reduces environmental pollution caused by papermaking, and saves transportation costs Second, it is easy to buy, easy to carry, and can be read anytime, anywhere, and now the reader has a huge capacity, and it has become a reality to carry a “library” with you: Third, e-books can be searched for full text and catalogues Drawing, marking, and editing can also be used in electronic dictionaries. At the same time, multimedia technology is used, with both audio and text, even blind people can read by listening. Fourth, e-books are easy to save, not afraid of fire, flooding and rot. There will be no tragedy in which the Library of Alexandria is destroyed and its collections destroyed.
More importantly, e-books meet the needs of young people who are looking for new trends in the digital age. Nowadays, young people can be seen browsing and reading with mobile phones or other e-readers everywhere in shopping malls, buses, and college campuses. Electronic reading has become a fashion and a habit among young people. Especially for students, the price of books in bookstores is relatively high now, generally ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan. If you buy all of them, the cost is too high, and there are many inconveniences to borrow books in the library. However, downloading e-books from the Internet for a few yuan is not only cheap and fashionable, but also saves time and effort, so reading e-books is very popular among students. In addition, students usually carry a stack of books with them, which is already very heavy. In addition to textbooks, it will be more laborious to bring some books for extended reading. E-books solve this problem. Students usually download a large number of e-books online, which is invisible. Increase your reading volume and enrich your extracurricular life.
E-book – the gospel of writing lovers E-
books bring the gospel to writing lovers. American Boyd Morrison, because he likes to create, gave up his original job a few years ago to write books. Unfortunately, he wrote three novels in a row, and found multiple publishers asking for publication, but all were rejected. In desperation, he put his novels on Amazon’s online bookstore and sold e-books. Fortunately, one of the novels “The Ark Catastrophe” ranked first on the bestseller list for several months. By 2010 With “Ark Cataclysm” sold in 20 countries, the American became the first example of a best-selling author without a publishing house.
In 2010, the world’s first author to sell 1 million e-books – Swedish author Stig Larsen. Larson began writing a Millennium novel series in 2001, a series of crime stories about a woman with a special background and an insider magazine owner. In 2008, Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader, and the Millennium series naturally has an electronic version. As of 2010, the Millennium series had sold 1 million e-books, and Larson became an e-book hit author.
Even better for e-book authors, e-book operators can pay authors more in royalties than traditional publishers. Recently, a letter to shareholders from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was released by the media, which pointed out that the scale of the publishing service of the company’s Kindle Direct Publishing (hereinafter referred to as “KDP”) “expanded at an alarming rate.” At present, more than 1,000 KDP authors have sold more than 1,000 books per month, and some authors have sold hundreds of thousands of books, and two of them have entered the “Kindle Millions Club”. According to it, KDP authors can get royalties equivalent to 70% of sales. The royalty rate for paper book authors is about 6% to 15%, and 8% is more common. Some works are not even paid for royalties because they are bought out by the publisher at one time.
Now, writing enthusiasts can write and publish e-books and become e-book authors. Publishing books has somehow gone from being a profit to being a way to feel good and express yourself. The network also provides many gadgets for making e-books, and authors can make their favorite e-books at will with their mobile phones. At the same time, e-books can also satisfy some people’s desire to become famous: if you create attractive e-books, there will be a lot of fans spreading these e-books, you will be sought out every day, your admirers will become more and more, and you Build your own fan team and become a celebrity!
The Development and Prosperity of E-book
Compared with the development of mobile phones and televisions, the development speed of e-books can be said to be surprising. In 2008, Amazon, the largest online e-commerce company in the United States, launched its e-reader Kindle and it was sold out within 5 hours, and many people in the industry began to lament that “we have finally reached a turning point”. In December 2009, Amazon announced that the sales of e-books on its website had surpassed the sales of physical books; e-book sales in 2010 doubled from 2009, accounting for 15% to 20% of total sales: In 2011, Kindle has become the most The best-selling gift, the annual sales reached 17.5 million, the operating income was 2.1 billion US dollars, the sales of e-books also reached 314 million, and the operating income was 1.7 billion US dollars. The combined revenue of the two will account for Amazon’s annual operating income. 8% of income. In 2011, Apple’s iPad also sold 1 million units in less than a month. Andriod tablet also brings readers a good reading experience. In 2012, global e-book display shipments will rise from 150,000 in 2007 to 18.3 million, with a compound annual growth rate of 161%. It is estimated that global e-book display sales in 2012 will increase from 3.5 million in 2007 rose to $291.2 million, a compound annual growth rate of 143%.
Magazines and newspapers are even more so. In 2010, the famous American “Wired” magazine first published the iPad version and sold 100,000 copies in the first month. In February 2011, the first completely paperless newspaper appeared in the United States, The Daily, an iPad edition of News Corp. Chairman Murdoch and Apple’s Steve Jobs.
The rise of e-books has impacted traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, prompting them to transform. The world’s largest bookstore Barnes&Noble announced the launch of Barnes&Noble e-Bookstore e-bookstore service in July 2009, which can provide more than 700,000 books and is known as the world’s largest e-bookstore. Today, the e-book category of the site has exceeded 1 million. The existing e-books include the newly published In the Heart of the Canyon, The Shanghai Moon, and the “Twilight” series Eclipse on the sales chart. The e-book is priced at $9.99, which is about 40% to 30% off the physical book.
The current situation of P-book and its PK
e-book with E-book make the living space of paper book squeezed unprecedentedly. On March 13, 2012, the Chicago-based Encyclopedia Britannica announced that it would stop printing the 244-year-old paper version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (also known as “Encyclopedia Britannica”) and will only provide the electronic version in the future. . Saying goodbye to paper books is really a last resort. In 1990, Encyclopædia Britannica sold 120,000 copies in the United States, for a record $650 million in total sales. Since then, with the launch of the free and fast Google search engine and Wikipedia, sales of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica plummeted, so that print book revenue now accounts for less than 1% of the company’s total revenue. The online version started in 1994 and now has more than 100 million users worldwide. In addition, the electronic version of the encyclopedia can be updated from time to time, while the printed version may be out of date by the time of printing.
As the “leading boss” in the world of encyclopedias, “Encyclopedia Britannica” has moved from offline to online this time, which is considered to indicate that paper tome dictionaries will gradually become history.
Does the experience of “Encyclopedia Britannica” mean that paper books are better than e-books? On April 4, 2012, the latest poll released by the Pew Research Center in the United States showed that paper books were not left out as people thought. For example, among the “readers” who have the habit of reading before going to bed, 45% and 43% prefer e-books and paper books, almost tied; among e-book readers, they admit that they are still buying paper 88% of the people who pledged the documents. Also, when it comes to telling children stories from books and revisiting their favorite stories, paper books are still “hard currency.” Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe that people don’t feel good when reading articles on a computer screen, because the brain responds differently to information printed on paper and information displayed on a computer screen. Words and images printed in fixed locations on paper seem to have a special appeal to the part of the brain that stores “spatial maps.” The fact that computer screens scroll to display information seems to deprive the brain of some of the subtle visual and tactile cues that help us acquire new knowledge. From a psychological point of view, people are less tired and more receptive to the content when reading a book than watching a screen.
The existence of paper as a physical substance has its own advantages over electronic carriers. Visual fatigue may be solved through the development of technology, but psychological fatigue is an undoubted fact. In this regard, e-books are no match for paper books.
Furthermore, reading paper books can give us a sense of eternity. American bestselling author Jonathan Franzen has slammed e-books, saying they are “unsuitable for serious readers” and “bad for society.” In his opinion, a sense of permanence has always been part of the reading experience, and he is reassured by the permanence of paper books, which is not found in e-books, because the screen always feels like it can be deleted, modified, moved. This sense of permanence allows us to understand the content of the book more deeply, which in turn sparks the spark of inspiration and generates new ideas. Reading through the screen will definitely affect the reading effect.
In addition, the cultural atmosphere of paper books cannot be replaced by e-books. The ancients liked to read the original manuscript of the author, because even if it was the same word in the same article, because the writer’s mentality was different at that time, different calligraphy art would be presented in the pen, which is a wonderful cultural atmosphere. Although the characters on paper books are now engraved and printed, they also have a scent of ink (the scent of books), which is a cultural atmosphere that cannot be replicated by e-books. For older readers, reading paper books is a process of savoring culture, which can immerse themselves in an atmosphere, reminisce from time to time, and enjoy the joy of reading.
For readers who love books, paper books also have the function of collecting and adding value. The classic typesetting and art design of hardcover books will always make people feel unforgettable. From this point of view, the inheritance of paper books to human culture is also within reach of e-books. The hope of a counterbalance lies.
Coexistence of E-book and P-book
As early as 1964, before the advent of computers, the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov predicted in his novels that a device called a reading machine would become widely popular. In today’s Internet age, consumers’ reading habits have been deeply influenced by the Internet, and many people obtain various information through the Internet, so the popularity of e-books is inevitable. Cheap and massive online reading continues to erode the proportion of traditional readers. However, the market needs calm managers and calm customers. It is true that e-books have huge advantages, but we cannot give up the use of paper products because of this. We can use e-books as a fashionable, convenient and fast tool, but we must not forget the joy of reading paper books. For thousands of years, paper books have been used as a carrier of culture, not only because of their material functions, but also because they have become a symbol of culture on a certain level.
It is worth optimistic that the reading habits of readers cannot be changed overnight, and the transition of the market to electronic publishing will have a long transition period. So, despite the growing popularity of e-books, traditional books will not be wiped out in the same way that television did not kill movies, and one medium will not completely disappear just because another medium emerges. At present, the problem facing readers is to use both rationally: the best way to read is to focus on paper books, supplemented by e-books; buy cheap paper books and download more expensive ones; Intensive reading, e-books are extensive reading, mainly to search and consult; paper books are for self-cultivation, and e-books are for work and survival. The two complement each other, perfectly complement each other, and coexist harmoniously.
