Analysis: The Four Sectors

The developments of all the digital publishing sectors has some interesting growth points and are great for historical tracking of the market. I am most interested in the Professional Reference and Consumer Market. As a small business hopeful I can understand the need to get your product or service information to a mass of people in a format they will utilize. And as a reader I am very interested in the development of digital books and where they are going, I love the fact that I can carry hundreds of books in my tablet with all my computing capabilities.

The Professional Reference sectors grow form desire to get more product or service information out to potential customers. This started with the digitizing of catalogs and distribution through CD-ROMS. As this became less cost effective and online storage space became larger and more readily accessible that became the preferred method of distribution. These methods saved paper cost and distribution cost. The digital references give a lot of flexibility with searching documents that the paper copies did not have. This makes it easier and faster for customers to find what they are looking for and move on, making for happier customers. Adding embedded additional information is another strong point for digital documents. This allows retailers to add all sorts of extra information such as customer testimonials, product statistics, or pictures and video of the service.

I have been watching with excitement as the Consumer Market has grown and changed. It may have been the slowest of the four to gain traction but it has made some leaps and bounds to catch up.  It has changed the way we look at the value of some products. Books to ebooks are changing what we value in the product, is it the paper or the story printed on it? This change is pushing the E-Reader and Tablet market and causing some fast and fierce competition within the market. There are a lot of challenges in this field as well including pricing, which books to publish and security. A few of the other problems to consider are library loans, sharing a good book with a friend and what digital books will do to the second hand market.

There was a lot about the ebook development that was unaware of. The fact that publishers are staring to do there own ebooks with the hardcopy publication is an interesting development. Many third company ebook publishers came to fruition by publishing books that were popular in hardcopy and needed to be digitized, those options are being lost. That being said there is no shortage of opportunity in this field and it is growing. Amazon’s ebook sales are higher now then hardcopies.

Hall, F. (2013). Part II: Publishing sectors. In The business of digital publishing an introduction to the digital book and journal industries. New York: Routledge.