The printers and publishers are increasingly moving away from the legendary news print to other device formats like i-pads, netbooks and smartphones to disseminate their content. The prediction that one billion e-books will be sold on 100 million Tablets worldwide by 2012 is a clear indication of the fact that printers and publishers are just on course to clear path for entry of new-tech gadgets for content communication.
With the rapid rate of gizmo adoption among young the Indian population, no wonder e-books will be the dominant format of content display by 2014, said Ratan Datta, senior vice-president, global operations of publishing BPO company, Spi Technologies. ?The evolution is ongoing from print to web to multimedia. In the digital era, the tech-savvy youngsters prefer the content not just on print and web, but on other devices like mobile, i-pads and netbooks with multimedia enrichment,? he said. Sorav Jain, thinker of chief of digital marketing company, Echorme, said paper stands and physical book shelves would become irrelevant as tech-savvy reading community prefer virtual book shelfs on their devices. ?There is greater degree of agility in digital devices when compared to hard copy books or paper. In e-book hosting devices, it is not mere flipping over and reading pages after pages. There is an audio and video format of the content embedded into the device enabling a reader to listen or watch when one is bored of reading. With the integration of social media like Facebook and Twitter the author and publisher of the content could immediately gauge the feedback of the readers on the content purveyed,? he said. Jain bets big on social media integration with new age devices like Tablets and i- pads spurring the content sales among the discerning audience. ?Imagine a retweet button or Facebook hyperlink logo on the devices. A reader who is amazed with the book or article would be sharing that with his social network. This ripple effect would greatly help the business prospects of authors and publishers in beefing up their business among target audience,? he said. As content is fragmented across print, web and multimedia devices like e-books, standardisation is a challenge, said Subrat Mohanty, CEO of Hurix System. ?There are android powered tablets and apple powered tablets and content is created in different file formats like Powerpoint, Word document, PDFs and other sound and animation files. There is lack of uniformity in the file format compatible with the various devices. We would have to wait and see whether device manufacturers would bring uniform compatibility regardless of smart conversion engine that converts the content file format into device specific format,? he said.
