Page 27 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

forever; how many copies of those destroyed books might have survived in some form is unknown.12
From the speed at which over 15 million books were scanned we may con- sider the tremendous difference in velocity between the automated process of scanning and indexing compared to the centuries required for thinking, discussion, writing and editing before publishing in print or digital form. With the scanning and online publication of tens of millions of books, periodicals and manuscripts by Google and other organizations includ- ing academic libraries, the online publication, or conversion from print to online-only publication, of numerous periodicals and newspapers, and the development and exploding popularity of eBook for which the texts of untold numbers of books are available for reading on a growing diversity of eBook, cell phones, and computers, it is evident that books and digital information—formerly separate cultures—rapidly merged into one. The result of improved eBook readers, improved wireless communication, ex- panding selection of content, widespread adoption of online buying habits, and prior widespread adoption of other hand-held digital devices such as smart phones and MP3 players, success of the eBook is even more recent, dating back only as far as the introduction of the Amazon Kindle, which occurred in November 2007. The Apple iPad, a leading competitor to the Kindle, was introduced in January 2010. In December 2010 eBooks made up 9 to 10 percent of trade-book sales, double the rate of the previous year. On December 13, 2010 Amazon announced in its blog that “within the first 73 days of this holiday quarter it had sold “millions of the new Kindles.” On March 2, 2011 the New York Times reported Steve Jobs’s announcement that 100 million iBooks [eBooks] had been downloaded from Apple’s iBookstore during its first year of operation. In 2011 eBook sales represented 14% of all general consumer fiction and nonfiction books sold, according to Forrester Research.
The avalanche of the electronic book confirmed that computing is in- volved in virtually all aspects of book production, including writing, ed-
12 Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2000). 27