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Are We Going to Have to Give Up Print Books? Maybe Forever?
How do you feel about reading e-books for the rest of your life?
Between 2008 and 2014, sales of e-books and e-book readers went sky high. Everyone wanted to join the new craze — all those books at the touch of a button! So many free books! So many for 99 cents!
Bookshops started going out of business. Remember Borders? Amazon got bigger and bigger. Even if you didn’t have a Kindle, hey, this app means you can read e-books on your phone! (Cue an increase in people needing reading glasses…)
The one area of books that didn’t jump towards e-books was in children’s and YA. There were a lot of companies who tried to present picture books as apps, and no one succeeded, no matter how many gizmos they added.
I predicted right from the start that kids and teens wouldn’t take to e-books like adults. Why? Because everywhere I saw kids lugging laptops to school and being made to do more and more of their school stuff on computers. It wasn’t just that kids were sick of screens in that way, it was that they equated screens and books with school work and who wanted more of that?
When you’ve been in schools and seen kids hugging their favorite books? And kids who didn’t like reading were going to use their screens…
