Digital Reading Revolution?

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The Christmas break was a quieter period than normal due to the fact that my wife, Penny, had a bad dose of the 'flu. She was knocked out, like many people I know, which meant our family spent more time at home watching films and, in my case, reading.

Although I have a number of printed books in my list to catch up with, most of my reading was done using my new Amazon Kindle. It's magnificent. It is easy to read from, it has a long battery life, it's light and it is relatively cheap compared to the Apple iPad. I have a newspaper subscription for my Kindle, I subscribe to a couple of magazines, and I have bought electronic books for it since I took it out of the box on Christmas Day. The books are cheaper too, as are my subscriptions. I was given the 'Wifi' version of the Kindle because I already have a 3G 'dongle' so I had no need for the Amazon 3G service. The books I buy and the subscriptions I hold download and update extremely quickly too. In short, I am delighted with it.

But, more interestingly, when I came into the office this morning for my first day back at work, I saw that three of my colleagues had also been given Amazon Kindles for Christmas. All of them are delighted with their new reading device. Amazon has sold millions of their e-readers now and I expect that people are buying books, newspapers and magazines like me. For publishers, this Christmas is likely to have been a major turning point in their digital book sales. In general, the major publishers' revenues from digital books are between 1% and 2% per year of their turnover. I think that this will change rapidly this year as people start to fill their Kindles.

When you add the popularity of the Apple iPad into the mix, it's highly likely that the digital reading revolution has just taken a giant leap forwards.
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