The future of e-books in 2017
Introduction
Information technology and especially the Internet have changed the ways of publishing. Newspapers and magazines have for years been published online and all kinds of texts are now available in digitised form. At the turn of the century this digitalisation of the written language finally reached the book publishing industry. Electronic books or e-books, can now be bought and downloaded from various kinds of e-bookstores on line.
Team Composition
Research Questions
In our research we have identified 5 different categories, namely:
- History (Xin Yu)
- Economic Perspective/Value (Raymond)
- General Information (Raymond/Sanna)
- Prospective usage of books (Bas)
- Law, Legislation and Stakeholders (Bauke)
See the research questions section for the actual questions and answers.
Driving Forces
Based on the PEST theory
Political
- Authors rights and personality rights changes
- Members of WIPO leave
- The future of publishing and supply chain change
- Government control of publishing
Economic
- Authors of books will be creating books under "open source like" licences
- eBooks and the effect on knowledge sharing in developing countries
- Importance of learning increases over protection
- Emergence of E-publishing
Environmental
Social
- Literacy rates increase worldwide
- Escalation of plagiarism accusation
- Is there a future for the library
- Perception of reading habit
Technological
- Development of e-book readers
- New features compared to printed books
- New development in (free)energy http://www.steorn.org
- Unified standard for e-books
- Books (paper) are preferred over digital media
- Copyrights of digitized books become untrackable
- Screen technology
- Conversion of books to eBooks