Have e-books reached a critical mass?
There’s an interesting article in today’s Financial Times (29 July) about Amazon’s new Kindle (‘Amazon rolls out new version of e-reader‘ by David Gelles and Kenneth Li – NB: restrictions on access to FT.com – available on Nexis from 30 July at latest).
While not directly addressing academic publishing, I think there are two important points in the article which are of interest to us:
- E-reader devices are becoming cheaper all the time ($139 for a wi-fi version of Kindle according to the FT article). This should ultimately make it easier for e-books to catch on in the student population;
- There is still resistance at publisher level and fears that e-books “will eat into their margins” (FT article). This resistance also exists at academic publishing level where there can still be a considerable delay between the print publication of a new edition of a student text book, and it’s availability online.
What can we do for you?
Notwithstanding publisher concerns, the market for student e-books and online research monographs is still expanding. Whenever you put in an order for multiple copies of student texts, we automatically investigate e-book options. However, if you are interested in any particular titles that you want as an e-book (or indeed collections of research monographs in databases!), please tell us. We can order individual e-books without any problem. Of course online packages cost more, but we can still look into them.
