The relatively sudden increase in the popularity of e-books has some major implications for the future of publishing. Driven by the growing popularity of e-book readers – like the Amazon Kindle for instance – e-books have rapidly become accepted by the public. It would be easy to view them as little more than another way to deliver written content. However, they may prove to be the most significant change to reading since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Now you may think that statement to be a little melodramatic – but the emergence of e-book totally changes the traditional publishing cycle. As a rule, publishers tend to release hardback books followed, usually a few months to a year later, by the paperback edition. Obviously there is no reason why the e-book edition wouldn’t be published at the same time as the hardback.

E-books don’t use any paper, chemicals or bindings, and they don’t require to be shipped – so they cost much less than a traditional printed book. What this means is that the e-book version could be made available at a reduced price concurrently with the hardback book. That could make a big dent in the profits of the major publishing firms – especially when you take the fact that e-book reader owners are likely to be fairly heavy readers into consideration.

There have already been some fairly heated discussions between Amazon – who wanted to price all e-books at $ 9.99 or less – and the publishing houses. At one point, all books by McMillan were withdrawn from the Amazon website. Whilst things have quietened down a little for the – it appears highly probable that e-book prices will fall further in future.

But there are some positive aspects for publishing firms. Obviously they will have reduced costs when selling e-books, so they should be able to find a way to profit. They will also have alternative options for the marketing of books.

Amazon’s library of Kindle books is the far and away the largest available on the web at the moment. They have more than 700,000 titles to choose from – and there are a further 1.8 million out of copyright books which are available as free download from the Amazon Kindle store. The large majority of these were published pre-1923, but there are other examples of more modern books which can be downloaded for free.

You will frequently find some publishers offering modern, recently published, books for free. This might be done for a short period only – say a fortnight or so. It gives them the opportunity to showcase a new author or title and the increased number of downloads will help the book to rise up the best sellers list. After it has risen in the rankings, publishers can begin charging for it and benefit from the added publicity. You might also see the first in a series being offered for free. The idea is clearly that readers enjoy the opening title and then go on to buy further titles in the series.

It’s true that both of these marketing techniques could, conceivably, have been used with traditional books. However, it would cost a lot more money, and therefore be a much riskier undertaking. It seems obvious that e-books are going to be a permanent addition to the publishing landscape. No doubt there will be some publishing firms who will attempt to safeguard their profits using somewhat restrictive techniques. It will be the ones that adapt to the new digital publishing landscape by offering value to both readers and authors who survive.