Digitization and the Future
The Frankfurt Book Fair published results of a survey entitled "How will digitization shape the future of publishing?" Over 1,000 industry professionals from more than 30 countries responded to the survey. Overall, the findings are pretty interesting.
40% of respondents expect e-Content will overtake traditional books in sales by 2018.
60% of those polled do not currently use e-books or e-readers.
When asked who was driving the move towards digitization in the book industry, just 7% believed publishers were leading the way.
22% said consumers were pushing digitization; 21% said online retailers like Amazon were responsible; 20% pointed to Google as the main influencer.
Only 2% thought authors had any serious influence on the push toward digitization.
Significant concerns exist. 28% of those polled said copyright issues caused the biggest worry. 22% thought digital rights management was important. Standardizing on a file format (such as epub) was brought up by 21% of the respondents, while 16% thought retail price maintenance was a top concern.
Full details of the poll can be found here.