PUBLISHING

Throughout the 20th century, new art forms and mass media have often been
closely interrelated. For example, it is almost impossible to consider Cubist,
Dadaist and Pop Art collage outside the context of a mass culture of newspaper
publishing. With the advent of electronic publishing, the practices of dissecting,
copy-pasting and perpetually reorganizing have become technologically
and culturally more complex – as well as more common. In this Toolkit,
we have referred to such processes as the ‘modularization’ of electronic
publishing. Personalized, individually curated, or ‘collaged’ content can be
done both on the side of the producer and of the receiver. Furthermore, users
can choose their own combinations of reading technologies. There is no reason
to believe that the current diversity of reading software and hardware is
going to decrease. Indeed, perhaps it will increase even further – contrary to
expectations from only five years ago, when many believed that Apple’s iPad
would establish a unified standard for electronic reading devices.
Is it possible then to make a few general statements about the future of
electronic publishing? We can distinguish some real trends, though of course
predictions are always questionable in a field so prone to fashions and hypes.
(The End of Ebooks. 20 Visionaries on the Future of Digital Reading)
TECHNOLOGY
Reading novels and other conventional texts on e-reader devices is already a
common practice, and the technology is clearly an industry success. Publishers
report ever-increasing sales of ebooks. It is quite possible that someday
soon, sales of electronic publications will surpass those of paper publications.
1
At the same time, the market for e-reading devices is increasingly showing
signs of saturation. Early mass producers of monochrome e-readers such as
Sony have dropped out of this market, so that the further development of
these devices is left to smaller companies such as Kobo. This may to a large
extent be a result of the popularity of tablets and smartphones. Since smartphones
are sold with increasingly large screens, we are already seeing signs
1 Digital sales outstrip bricks and mortar in US, http://www.thebookseller.com/news/digital-sales-outstripbricks-and-mortar-us.
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