Contemporary society claims that the publishing industry is dying and the innovation of e-books will eventually cause printed books to death. Articles and books critical of the Internet, including the Internet’s impact on reading, have increased in recent years. The digital revolution has significantly impacted the ways of publishing. Most people are reading very differently today than they were in the past. Currently, the book industry is engaged in an active debate about how the use of eBook channels will impact traditional print books. On one side of the debate are eBook platform providers, such as Amazon, who claim that eBooks will not destroy print books, it could be the main method of selling (Hu and Smith 3). On the other side, many book publishers worry that print books and eBooks offer essentially the same content in different formats. They think that eBooks would cannibalize sales of print books because it has a lower price than a print book and take no time to produce (Out of Print 2013). No one knows what the future of e-publishing will hold, but its developments affect the publishing industry, authors, and consumers.
Knowledge has wider dissemination on the internet because it is convenient for people to find books and access information, which increases cultural diversity. Literate people across societies throughout the world are reading digital screens on a regular basis. People do cursory reading every day through a text–saturated worlds, such as reading billboards, school memos, news Web sites, e–mail messages, Facebook, or text messages (Wolf 2013). Spending time online does not mean people develop their online research or advanced reading skills automatically (Cull 2011). When it comes to university students, especially beginning undergraduates, ease of access to information often continues to be more important than the accuracy of that information for them (Cull 2011; Nicholas, et al., 2009;). They want the easiest and quickest way to get the information, such as getting quick snippets by Google or reading summaries of books online. They don't want to go and read through the material themselves (Out of Print 2013). It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense. For many readers, print books continue to be more suited to in–depth reading than e–books on computers. (cull 2011)
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Moreover, E-books are destroying the business model. The book industry is facing a major change in distribution. Instead of the “traditionally publisher-to-retailer-to-customer” chain, new ways of distribution have appeared on the market, and new emerging platforms such as Scribd2 and Amazon have been created. Book retailers are experiencing anxiety and stress and Amazon is being accused of being “predatory”. Traditional publishers and libraries with their place and value chains are at a disadvantage (Vrethager 10). Authors are no longer restricted to traditional publishing houses. E-books require less traditional editing and production work and selling in new ways, which leads to a new value chain emerging, the true sign of disruption (Hu and Smith 5). The low price for top-selling e-books puts additional independent bookstores and gives Amazon more market power. To avoid being destroyed by E-books, the biggest bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, which had to close around 150 stores, decided to open its own website. In order to reduce the shipping costs with joint shipment, they provide the “pick up in store” feature if you order online (Vrethager 12).
Compared with the established authors who already signed up with big publishers with great connections, new or relatively unknown authors in foreign markets always encounter lots of difficulties. According to the report from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (2018) in the last ten years, author earnings have dipped by 42%, and the professional authors’ median annual income is now below £10,500. Authors have been seeing their livelihood become less profitable. Therefore, some of them give up writing because they lack money to make a living and some of them need to spend their writing time on self-publishing (Out of Print). For a self-published author, it could be easier to get access to the English-speaking world as nowadays big distributors such as Amazon sign deals (Vrethager 12). The concern is this will result in a monopoly because it maintains higher market occupancy. This is a disturbing prospect that a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution in the book business (Packer, par.10).
Amazon’s early investments in eBooks and e-readers turned it into a digital publishing and book-selling powerhouse. Nearly two dozen imprints and tens of millions of self-published works are overseen on Amazon's platform. Amazon had more than 83 percent of all US eBook sales in 2017 (Statt, par. 3–5). With its fancy E-Ink technology and artful design that is convenient to carry and keep, Amazon’s product, Kindle becomes a threat to the publishing of books, the selling of books, and also the reading of books. However, did Amazon ever really care about books? John Thompson points out that What Amazon doing is “replicating the narrative experience of page turning and linear reading in a digital form” (37). Amazon chose books at the beginning because Jeff Bezos discovered the interest between the number of books in bookstores and the number of books in print. Books became a means to an end and now it is just one of the many things that Amazon was involved in (Chai, par.30). This company which claims to want a more literate world is making privately owned copies of many works that are already in the public demand, which is changing the Carnegie model of making knowledge available to the people. (Out of Print). Many readers consider that books are their property. They can borrow books, sell them second-hand, and read books as many times. However, this is not the case since the readers have permission to store the content but not own it according to the terms proffered by Amazon and Sony (Stone 3). The monopoly of people's access to knowledge becomes an issue. The democratization of access to knowledge and the protection of copyright are important for the development of eBooks (Out of Print).
Moreover, the problems of preservation are gigantic because it takes a lot of money to maintain and update the information(Out of Print). There are 45 electronic text formats, such as Sony’s BBeB and Amazon’s AZW, and at least ten different E-readers currently on the market. There's a problem of obsolescence, the hardware and the software can become obsolete(Out of Print). Although these E-readers support different types of text formats, it may increase the risk of difficulties in transferring libraries from one device to another when the original machine is damaged or becomes obsolete (Stone 3).
New technologies often do not completely replace older proven technologies. It’s not difficult to find people who do not accept e-readers and e-books. The depth of reading is more important than the way of reading because accessing information and the acquisition of knowledge are different. The development of eBooks made it convenient for people to find the book they want, but it does not mean that people can gain knowledge easier than before. Whether in print or online text, it still contains content that can initiate us to ponder thoroughly. People need to spend their time on reading and finding something interesting or thought-provoking on the books. Whatever the future of information technology is to be, people need to improve the skill of in–depth reading throughout their lives.
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