Jeff Bezos on the Future of Amazon and Selling E-Books Online - Customer Experience (1999)

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• published: 03 Jan 2014
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An electronic book (variously: e-book, eBook, e-Book, ebook, digital book, or even e-edition) is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", many e-books exist without any printed equivalent. Commercially produced and sold e-books are usually intended to be read on dedicated e-book readers, however, almost any sophisticated electronic device that features a controllable viewing screen, including computers, many mobile phones, and all smartphones can also be used to read e-books. There have been several generations of dedicated hardware e-book readers. The Rocket eBook[31] and several others were introduced around 1998, but did not gain widespread acceptance. The establishment of the E Ink Corporation in 1997 led to the development of electronic paper, a technology which allows a display screen to reflect light like ordinary paper without the need for a backlight; electronic paper was incorporated first into the Sony Librie (released in 2004) and Sony Reader (2006), followed by the Amazon Kindle, a device which, upon its release in 2007, sold out within five hours. As of 2009, new marketing models for e-books were being developed and a new generation of reading hardware was produced. E-books (as opposed to e-book readers) have yet to achieve global distribution. In the United States, as of September 2009, the Amazon Kindle model and Sony's PRS-500 were the dominant e-reading devices.[32] By March 2010, some reported that the Barnes & Noble Nook may be selling more units than the Kindle in the US.[33] On January 27, 2010 Apple Inc. launched a multi-function device called the iPad[34] and announced agreements with five of the six largest publishers[citation needed] that would allow Apple to distribute e-books.[35] The iPad includes a built-in app for e-books called iBooks and the iBookstore. The iPad, the first commercially-profitable tablet computer, was followed in 2011 by the release of the first Android-based tablets as well as LCD versions of the Nook and Kindle; unlike previous dedicated e-readers, tablet computers are multi-function, utilize LCD displays (and usually touchscreens), and (like iOS and Android) be more agnostic to e-book vendor applications, allowing for installation of other e-book vendors. The growth in general-purpose tablet computer use allowed for further growth in popularity of e-books in the 2010s. In July 2010, online bookseller Amazon.com reported sales of e-books for its proprietary Kindle outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time ever during the second quarter of 2010, saying it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was no digital edition.[36] By January 2011, e-book sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales.[37] In the overall US market, paperback book sales are still much larger than either hardcover or e-book; the American Publishing Association estimated e-books represented 8.5% of sales as of mid-2010, up from 3% a year before.[38] At the end of the first quarter of 2012, e-book sales in the United States surpassed hardcover book sales for the first time.[39] In Canada, The Sentimentalists won the prestigious national Giller Prize. Owing to the small scale of the novel's independent publisher, the book was initially not widely available in printed form, but the e-book edition became the top-selling title for Kobo devices in 2010.[40] Use of an e-book reader is disallowed on commercial airliners during takeoff and landing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_book Image By James Duncan Davidson from Portland, USA (Etech05: Jeff) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons