What’s Next For Digital Books?

Barnes and Noble just admitted its color tablet Nook has been an abject failure. Its stock tanked on the news, causing a cloud not only over B&N, but the digital book industry. No one knows what’s next in digital publishing except for a few tech lab rats, but to have an understanding of where we’re heading, let’s take a look back at the past year:

June 2012 – Kobo announces its Writing Life self-publishing program, competing with Amazon’s KDP and Barnes & Noble’s PubIt.

August 2012 – Digital Book World starts publishing weekly aggregated e-book bestseller lists that break out price tiers.

December 2012 – Publishers Marketplace launches Bookateria, an online book discovery platform. 

January 2013 – Reader Link pairs with Textr in the US.

February 2013 – Bookish launches and Daily Lit joins forces with Plympton, an e-serial start up. 

March 2013 – Digital children’s publisher, Frederator, launches and Amazon Publishing launches literary fiction and memoir imprint as Little A, also adds digital shorts imprint, Day One.

None of the above items were landmark events, but collectively they show how fast and continuously things move in the digital space.  Heck, it hasn’t even been that long since the Kindle debuted and revolutionized how books are read and sold.  The iPad followed a few years later.  We’re due for the next big thing.  

I suspect deep into the fall, on the cusp of the holiday season, we’ll see some shiny new object come out that we’ll all think we have to have. 

And by the time some of us get around to buying it, some other new digital toy will hit the shelves. 

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2013