The Eastern Europe sales representative for university presses including Chicago, Harvard and Yale, Ewa Ledóchowicz, has written a terrific post on the Yale University Press blog about the mixed blessings of the increasingly borderless world – and specifically the effect of e-books on the retailing of scholarly works. How are people deciding what they want to read? Are specialist bookshops viable? More questions than answers – but a great post nonetheless.
The Enlightened Economist
Economics and business books
The mixed blessing of an increasingly borderless world comes in many guises. One, of course, is the ebook of scholarly works and works in general, can be put in more people’s hands. Education becomes the key. Less borders, more reading, the world gets better educated. Now we need to get computers to third world countries so they can read.
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education
….They’ll be reading on smartphones before they get online with PCs. Publishers for developing country markets should be thinking low-cost and mobile. But authors/publishers everywhere surely right to be concerned about how they’ll get to readers and how they’ll get enough of the value to keep them in business with all these new gatekeepers demanding a 30% share?