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Digital books at the tipping point?

After almost a decade spent trying to find their sea legs, digital books and readers have finally taken off in the past two years. Thanks to dedicated devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s reader, and the Kobo e-reading device, as well as gadgets like Apple’s multipurpose iPad, readers are beginning to gravitate en masse to digital formats. Indeed, e-books are one of the few areas in the book publishing industry that have shown unambiguous growth recently.

According to the LA Times, e-book sales in the U.S. accounted for close to $1 billion in revenue in 2010, a 400 per cent increase over the year before. The jump in popularity is attributed at least in part to the decreasing price of e-readers.

And it seems as though publishers, who long fought the digital revolution, are starting to come around in their thinking. From the LA Times:

“I’d like to think we are entering a golden age of publishing,” said Brian Napack, president of Macmillan…. Jane Friedman, who used to run HarperCollins and now leads Open Road Media, a start-up e-book publisher, agreed. “I think the industry is vibrant, vital,” she said.

One indication of how accepting the industry is becoming is hinted at in an article from the Sydney Morning Herald. For the first time, jurors for the Man Booker Prize will be offered e-readers loaded with the eligible titles.

Writer Susan Hill, who is one of the five members of this year’s judging panel, tweeted: “We are to be given Kindles for Booker judging so they won’t have to post us tons of real books.”

A spokeswoman for the prize said this was the first year publishers had been asked to supply electronic copies of their books as well as hard copies and both would be available to the judges.

The idea of judging books using an e-reader is intriguing, but it also brings up a question: if, as was suggested on NPR late last year, the Kindle has the theoretical power to monitor a user’s reading habits, does this involve privacy issues where literary jurors are concerned? How would the jury process be affected, for example, if people knew in advance that jurors returned to book X a dozen times, whereas they stopped reading book Y on page five? Digital reading may be exploding, but there are still unresolved issues that need to be addressed.

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