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The
Growth of Fantasy Ebooks
By Andrew Rodgers
I love how markets work, the facts and figures that you can find in
regards to product segments, their trends, strategies and their
implementation. So it's of no wonder that I have had
a quick
search around to see what is happening in the world of ebooks and in
particular with the growth to the fantasy genera.
As
a
brief overview there are really only two distinct camps with regards to
the ebook phenomenon. Firstly are those who see this format
as a
waste of effort and energy to invest in, primary amongst those is the
CEO of Apple Steve
Jobs who has surmised his opinion as
realistically
people don’t read any more and as such it’s not
worth
investing time into
developing.
An interesting
side note is
that the Apple iphone is now going to have a kindle application on it,
so an
about face or simply a prudent business decision? I
would like to believe the latter rather
than the former as to me, and seemingly the vast majority of people who
are
writing on this topic, what we need to be providing is new
technologically
based formats for reading thus it’s about delivering a
user-friendly platform
or platforms to bring people back to the written word and as such you
can see
this as happening and it will continue to do so as this type of work
becomes
more widely available.
Thus with the
release of kindle2 in the EU and now the kindle application on the
iphone we
will see an increased number of people once again picking up written
works.
On
the other side of the coin are of course advocates such
as myself who do believe that this format has longevity, flexibility
and also a
future.
When you look at
some basic
facts there is great growth in the ebook format but what I personally
found
exciting was that the fantasy genera is actually one of the largest if
not the
largest segment in the market.
There are
actually a few good reasons for that, one is of course the large amount
of
content available, of which you can get some good works and some
average works,
as discussed in a previous post I do believe that our choice could
still be
expanded with the introduction of major works to the medium. Secondly
is the technically savvy nature of
fantasy fans.
This alone allows
for a
greater introduction of titles to the genera as we are more likely to
be
picking up ebooks to read than other social demographics.
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