NEW YORK, Oct 22 — The publishing industry has been under a dark cloud recently. Sales are down this year, despite prominent books by Dan Brown and Edward Kennedy.
Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a war for e-commerce dominance, creating new worries among publishers and authors about dwindling profits.
Amid the gloom, however, some sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books.
Amazon, for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December last year, when the company last provided the statistic.
“You are going to see very significant industry growth rates as a result of the convenience of this kind of reading,” said Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.
Sony, maker of the Reader family of devices, says its e-book customers, on average, download about eight books a month from its online library. That is far more than the approximately 6.7 books the average American book buyer purchased for the whole of last year, according to Bowker, a publishing industry tracking firm.
The e-reader market also has a new competitor, the Nook, introduced by Barnes & Noble on Tuesday.
The book-buying numbers at Amazon and Sony may not, by themselves, indicate a new interest in reading, as owners of e-book devices tend to be among the most passionate book buyers. Even so, fans of the reading devices suggest that the convenience of using these products, which offer a sense of control and customisation that consumers have come to expect from all their media gadgets, has created a greater interest in books.
Patti Howard is among the converted.
“It’s been a long time since I felt this way about books,” said Howard, a medical transcriptionist from Birmingham, Alabama, who for years confined her book reading to 10 minutes before bed until she got an Amazon Kindle in August.
She now buys books any time she wants. She recently downloaded a fantasy novel at 2.30am, immediately after finishing the previous book in a series.
Other fans praise the many benefits of e-book devices. The Kindle and Sony Reader, with their grey-and-white screens and adjustable type sizes, offer a satisfying experience with few of the distractions of other technologies.
Multiple books can also be carried in a slender device, so a reader can easily switch between books. E-books can also be bought quickly and from any location, with one or two clicks on devices like the Kindle and the Nook, which use wireless networks to download books.
However, some publishers are not quite willing to accept the notion that books can make a mainstream resurgence.
“Given the fact that people now have the Internet, football and tennis matches from around the world, TV shows and movies, do you really believe that people are going to be reading more because they can get it on a screen?” asked John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, owner of imprints like St Martin’s Press. “I don’t see the scenario.”
There is also the problem of e-book piracy, though it does not yet constitute a major problem in the United States.
Shayna Englin, a political consultant in Washington, reads an e-book each week, but she has actually never paid for one. Exploiting a loophole in Amazon’s system, Englin has linked her Kindle to the Amazon accounts of some nearby friends, allowing all of them to read books while paying for them only once.
“We haven’t really looked closely at Amazon’s terms of service, but I do suspect we are breaking the rules,” she said. — NYT
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