eBooks versus printed versions

Two interesting stories in ET today….

The first talking about how kindle sold more ebooks than Hard bounds… well hard bound do sell far lesser than paper back versions… hence don’t know how much will it do to displace conventional books.. also kindle is running a current scheme to promote ebooks which is highlighted in the next story on Penguin introducing ebooks on ipad with Video… and here they are doing it because they are not happy with Kindles strategy of discounting ebooks, besides the ipad ebook gives an opportunity to increase profitability. I wonder what the sales would have been if a similar promotion had been on hard bound books..

My take… print is here to stay… ebooks will bring in a lot more convenience for mobile readers and a lot more profitability to publishers… ebooks will though change certain reading habits (probably decrease their power to dream) of the new generation with the interactivity angle built into the books now… may be now while reading your novel on an iPad you probably don’t need to imagine the the city or the street or the room described by the author, you can either see the image, video or simply click on the link to see what the place looks like… hmmmm… takes the punch out of the novel… better watch a movie…