There’s something magical about owning a piece of media; the ability to look at it whenever you want, the fact it’s yours to own, or even to add to a long standing collection. However, in recent years we have become obsessed with making things digital: it started with videos transforming into DVD, closely followed by CD’s in MP3s, with the most recent to get a modern day face lift being books.
The introduction of smartphones and digital readers opened up a whole new world of possibilities for digital books. For a long time, it felt readers were not convinced with e-books at all. They argued that reading off a screen was too strenuous for their eyes and nothing could replicate reading from a physical page. Then from nowhere, brands such Kindle and Kobo perfected the subtle back light to ease the eyes of budding readers, saving the concept and everything around it. – The population soon came around, and e-reader sales soared.
According to reports, 30% of book purchases in 2014 were digital, which equates to £393 million spent on downloadable books, which appeared to show a growing trust in the product. Despite these impressive figures, physical book sales remained strong with £1.7 billion in 2014.
Fast forward a couple of years and market leaders such as Waterstones and the U.S.A’s Barnes & Noble have decided to pull e-books from their stores. So what’s the motivation behind this movement? What sort of message are they sending to their customers by turning their back on technology?
It seems that bookworms cannot be converted to the digital age after all. Managing director of Waterstones, James Daunt, explained that “sales of Kindles continue to be pitiful so we are taking the display space back in more and more shops”. David Prescott, C.E.O. of Blackwell’s echoed the same sentiment, stating “We’re not seeing a great deal of people who are buying an e-reader for the first time now,”
With more and more retailers ditching the e-readers, is there potential that other industries will also look to go back to physical media? It appears to have already happened in the music industry – It was reported that Vinyl player sales grew by 50% in 2014 alone, and Vinyl record sales were the highest they had been for 18 years. Perhaps we’ll soon see business stripped back to a more face-to-face approach, with the phone being more prominent than emails? Only time will tell.
As a population, our eyes are glued to screens all day; smartphones, laptops and TVs. We wait for content to download, we endure our batteries taking an age to charge and we suffer when devices crash. Is there money to be made in non-digital media to give us a break from our screens? Could the physical be returning to its former glory?
Time to whip out the Gameboy Colour.
