Will this decade be the end of mainstream physical books?

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As we have seen in the last couple of years physical music sales have gone down at a rapid speed. But on the otherhand Digital music sales are taking a good share of the loses on physical copies of songs. The poor sales are also partly due to piracy, but we will ignore that factor for now.

The iPhone for example is an excellent example of how books may get 'Digitalized'. It is a good medium to bring in Digital book sales as it will probably take a good share of the market and of the owners some will probably want to read a book on the go. And then there are paperback style readers that have two screens fold up and then you can page by page, just as you would with a novel. The devices that can carry this technolgy are endless.

It could be displayed on TVs, Laptops, Nintendo DS, Zunes and many more devices. But the text has to be easy for the readers to read as in a book would be. For instance, if I were tp load a book on my iPod nano, it would be pain to read a entire novel. I can probably read 1 page worth of text on it, but thats probably as far as I could go. It needs to suit consumers needs, but that can be done.

However, we have had technology like this before, but havent gotten off the ground due to costs, acceptance and portability. But this time things are very different. With the right backing and the evolution of the internet and digital distribution we will probably see a successful product such as songs on iTunes. We may just see Steve Jobs next year opening up the 'iTunes Book Store' to include the AudioBooks that are already available and books.

Digital Books have a clear advantage over tradition books. They are much cheaper to produce, no need to cut down tress, savings get passed down to consumers and other features like being able to pin point exactly where you left off (no need for bookmarks). And their are many mediums the books can come from, it will be simple for new authors to get recognition and it could feature the large print and small print versions in the same file.

However Digital Books have a disadvantage especially for the industry. We'll see the same thing thats happening with HMV happen to Chapters and we must remember that the book industry is very different from the music industry. There will also be hesitation for adoption of this by the older generation of readers due to lack of skills with technology, but as the teens and young adults of today grow older it will be a different story.

Google has sort of opened up the marketplace with Google Book Search, but in the next couple of years expect to hear some announcements from industry leaders and Im mainly looking at Apple Inc. to open up the industry due to their market lead with iPods.