2009 was the year that e-book readers became hot news. The Kindle 2.0 and the Kindle DX were launched by Amazon, which created quite a bit of publicity for e-book readers in general and the Kindle reader in particular. Companies like Sony and Barnes and Noble responded with their own readers – the Daily Edition and The Nook – whilst others, such as Apple and Microsoft worked hard to develop their own hardware for release in the near future.

E-book readers are essentially high tech electronic devices, so it’s quite natural to focus on the technical merits and demerits of the hardware involved. The Amazon Kindle has wireless functionality, the Nook has a color screen, Sony’s Daily Edition lets you borrow electronic books from participating libraries – etc.

However, it may be worth considering that e-book readers may very possibly be the biggest thing to happen to reading – and publishing – since the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440. This development allowed books to be mass produced on paper instead of vellum or parchment. It made books cheaper to produce and, quite literally, placed them in the hands of the common man.

There have been very few fundamental changes to the way we read books since then. Certainly we have seen changes in printing technology – computers and word processing software have made the existing process more cost effective and efficient. However, the end result has been much the same. The books that we read consist of paper with text printed upon it in some form of binding.

The unchanging end product imposes restrictions upon publishers. A physical product is produced – at some expense – which also needs to be delivered, either to the point of sale or by directly to the customer’s home.

E-book readers do not just represent a way of performing the conventional process more efficiently. They totally rewrite the rules, for both publishers and readers alike. For a start, the physical product (the book) is no longer required. This means that there is fewer materials are consumed. No paper, ink, chemicals, bindings etc. And without a physical product, no delivery costs are incurred.

This means that e-books are significantly cheaper to publish and deliver, and that they are – even considering the materials used in the e-book readers themselves – kinder to the environment.

Publishers also have additional available options to enable them to market both authors and. If a publisher wished to showcase a particular author for example, then they could make a selection of their work available at very low prices – or completely free – for a short period of time. Another increasingly common tactic is to offer the first title in a series free in the hope that the reader will buy subsequent titles or possibly other books by the same author. Whilst not completely impossible, this would be a much riskier and more costly undertaking using a traditional print run.

On the Amazon website there are a large number of free Kindle ebooks on offer. Other Kindle books on the site generally offer the first chapter as a free download. Prospective readers can try before they buy. This may well encourage readers to experiment a little and perhaps to try authors that they wouldn’t normally choose.

Concentrating on the new, shiny, hardware is perfectly understandable. However, in the longer term it will be the increased marketing opportunities and the ease of access afforded to readers that will make the difference in the way books are both read and published in the not too distant future.