Trending: E-Books; (September 2009)

AMAZON - the online retail giant, has done more than any other company to turn the sale of digital books into a strong and growing business with the 2007 launch of the Kindle electronic reader. Having sold an estimated 1.7 million of the handheld devices in the U.S., Amazon is now preparing to ship millions more. New Kindles will come complete with a key feature that allows users to wirelessly download e-books from Amazon in more than 100 countries.

E-READERS - have been around for more than a decade, but haven’t been popular due in part to high cost and the reluctance of book publishers to sell digital versions of their best-selling titles. But just as digital music has become mainstream media by Apple's iPod and iTunes, Amazon's Kindle and its online bookstore, with more than 350,000 titles, are proving there's a mass market for e-books. Total industry revenue from digital book downloads has risen 149% this year, according to the AAP. E-reader sales are expected to reach 3 million by Dec. 31 of this year. An estimated one million devices could be sold during the upcoming holiday season alone. In 2010, sales are projected to double.

PRICE WAR - between Wal-Mart and Amazon accelerated mid-October when Wal-Mart shaved another cent off its already rock-bottom prices for hardcover editions of some of the coming holiday season’s biggest potential best sellers, offering them online for $8.99. Skip to next paragraphPublishers, booksellers, agents and authors, are concerned that the battle will take prices for certain titles so low that it could cause fundamental damage to the industry and limit the ability of future authors to write or publish new works.

LIBRARIES ACROSS THE US - Eager to attract technologically-savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of e-readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than on shelves. “People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it’s a perception we’re always trying to fight,” said Michael Colford, director of information technology at the Boston Public Library. “If we don’t provide this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library altogether.” About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as audio book downloads. The online collections are still small. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-books, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of digital books represents less than 1 percent of the library’s overall acquisition budget. Circulation is, however, expanding quickly. Skip to next paragraph Publishers, of course, are nervous about allowing too much of their intellectual property to be offered free.