E-books Could Potentially Lead The Future

The Covid-19 pandemic forced bookstores to close indefinitely and therefore face the consequences of a new reality. Book lovers had now turned to other ways of consuming their favorite products. According to the U.S. Census data, bookstore sales had declined 31% in 2020 compared to the previous year.

So, how could someone read a new book without having to order it online and wait for its delivery?

Well, the solution for people who wanted to spend some reading time in quarantine was in e-books. Even though the e-book market had been in decline for the last years, consumers had now found a new interest in them, as they had suddenly become a great solution for them.

OverDrive, which is an online eBook and Audiobook website, offers users the ability to borrow and read for free, with just a library card or through an educational institute. During the first months of the pandemic, e-book loans on the specific website had jumped over 53%, and over 343.000 new users had subscribed to its services.

In the UK, e-books sales during the pandemic increased by 17% in the first half of 2020, providing publishers with their best year since 2015. The significant growth in e-book consumption had managed to counterbalance the decrease in sales of printed books.

Can e-books replace printed books?

We currently live in a digital era, where all aspects of product consumption have an online presence. In the case of e-books, this new service provides certain qualities that are far superior to those of print. The first thing that comes to most people’s minds is that they can have installed in a digital device, dozens of books, that they can also listen to while driving or cooking.

Yet the most important feature of them, at least in my mind is that they do not require the cutting of a tree to be produced. A very vivid example of the damage that a print book can cause to rainforest, is the case of a novel written by Jonathan Frazen, in 2010. A few typographical errors in his book “Freedom”, caused the return and destruction of nearly 80.000 copies that were later reprinted. That is quite a number, isn’t it?

Only time will tell what lies ahead for the future of this industry. Let’s just hope that people no matter the format will never stop reading books.