ABSTRACT
While the professional and scholarly sectors have well-developed digital products and business models, and the education markets have been following on rapidly, the consumer (or trade) markets have been slower to change. As the internet expanded and became more flexible as a rich mode for delivery of content, so specialist markets could all expand too; customers were increasingly used to using digital environments via computers for their activity and publishers had more direct relationships with their markets, which helped when developing and selling new products. While the internet was accessible to the consumer markets, the activity of reading
for the general reader did not really take place on or near a computer. Two main developments had to take place to ignite the market – the development of flexible ebook formats and the growth of affordable e-readers. As we have seen, there were early developments but it was not until around 2005 that the market started to develop, once the technology and hardware became more readily available. For consumer publishers the technical ability to produce straightforward ebooks has
not been a major problem, though some outlay has been required in terms of developing workflow and digitising past titles. The bigger problem has been how to price these products and put a price and value on the content. As we will see in this chapter and in Chapter 12, it is clear that customers have felt that, with savings in the cost of printing and distributing physical books, as well as in inventory management, the price of books should be cheaper.
