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Reading an ebook was once a novelty that many people shied away from. However, with the creation of hand-held ebook readers, the face of publishing has drastically changed and placed ebooks at the forefront of the industry. What once seemed strange and perhaps even awkward is now the normal, accepted way of reading a book. In fact, buying ebooks is now more common than buying print books. On book-selling websites of every size, ebooks are now the sought-after format.
Why Ebooks?
If you’re familiar with ebooks, you may already know how convenient they are. You can buy them from your computer or other Internet-enabled device without any wait time. You don’t have to travel to a bookstore or wait for anything to come in the mail. You may also have noticed how much easier it is to carry around an ebook reader than it is to carry around a stack of books.
What you may not have thought much about is the tactile difference between reading from a book and reading from an ebook. While books can be heavy and awkward to hold, ebook readers are made to be easy to hold even when the reader is using only one hand. It may take new readers of ebooks a little while to get used to the tactile experience. They may even resist switching from paper books at first simply because it feels different. But, once they read a book or two with an ebook reader, they often enjoy the experience enough to want to continue reading ebooks.
This adaptation process may explain the slow start to the digital book industry, but that period of adjustment is clearly now behind most readers. The meteoric rise of ebooks has meant that small ebook publishers who make new ebooks available online are now in a position to give real competition to the big publishers. Both now have an even playing field with the same distribution channels. This allows even new writers who don’t have a marketing budget behind them to sell their books and to build a readership.