BookTok, a subsection of the popular online platform TikTok, is where people around the world recommend and talk about a few of their favorite books. Some of the books that are recommended by BookTok become widely popular, and since the start of the platform, BookTok’s influence has only grown. According to the article “How BookTok revolutionized reading for a younger generation,” by Marketing Mag on July 18, 2023, “BookTok (and Bookstagram) has ignited a passion for reading by offering a new group of readers the chance to engage with fresh content and influence which books get to become a part of the conversation,” but it isn’t only printed books that BookTok has been recommending. From BookTok, e-books and e-readers have also grown in popularity. Some of the most popular e-readers that have been featured on BookTok are the Kindle from Amazon and the Kobo from Rakuten. E-readers allow readers to access thousands of books at the click of a button, and from this industry’s growing popularity, the publishing industry has had to change to accommodate this relatively new form of reading.
E-readers have been around since the early 1990s, but most of their popularity was gained in the early 2000s due to the release of Amazon’s first Kindle. The first e-reader was invented by Sony and was called the Data Discman. According to the article called “COMPANY NEWS; Sony Shows Data Discman,” from The New York Times on Sept. 13, 1991, the Data Discman was in stores in November of 1991 at the price of $550. Even though the Data Discman is no longer in production, it started a revolution in the publishing industry.
Over the past few decades, many e-readers and e-books alike have been released. When e-readers were introduced into mass production, many publishing companies were influenced to release e-books along with printed copies. The companion releases of e-books and printed books have only grown with the advancement in e-reader technology. Another major factor that led to the popularity of e-books is their cost: e-books tend to be cheaper than printed books, which makes them all the more desirable.
In general, e-books are cheaper to produce than printed books because of the absence of the production costs to make a printed book. For example, the cost of the first Dune book, the printed version is around $18.99 USD, while the e-book version is around $9.99. The price of e-books is also significantly reduced because publishers don’t have to store the books in a warehouse, which can be expensive depending on the amount of copies that are produced. Due to how cheap e-books are to produce, and the rising popularity of e-readers in general, publishing agencies around the world have been influenced to release billions of e-books. In just 2020 alone, there were 191 million e-books sold according to an article titled “Ebooks Sales Statistics 2023,” from Wordsrated on June 7, 2023. Overall, this multi-million dollar industry has been steadily growing since the 1990s and has forever changed the lives of millions of readers worldwide.
Even though e-readers have only been on the market for three decades, they have permanently altered the publishing industry. Some avid readers attribute e-reader’s popularity to the platform TikTok, but they have been popular since the first e-readers were released in the early 1990s. This form of reading and publishing has turned into the immense industry it is today because of the reduced prices it takes to produce these books, which attracts readers into purchasing an e-book over a printed one. E-readers have revolutionized the publishing industry and reading community, and it is interesting to see how far books have evolved; all the way from clay tablets to mobile e-reading technology.
