Manufacturers and publishers have been jockeying for the best positions in the steadily growing ebook market. Most publishers are now selling ebook versions of their titles, and some are selling in serious numbers.

Amazon.com has expanded its reader/client base by offering aps that allow reading Kindle-format ebooks on iPhone, Blackberry, iPad, Android, and PCs/Macs — or the Kindle reader. The aps are free and I suspect this is a good way to sell books.

Meanwhile the price of ebook readers continues to drop. I’ve always maintained that ebooks would take off when you could go to Walmart and buy a reader for under $100. That day is approaching with Target and others offering ebook readers with price tags hovering around $120.

We’re almost to my Walmart/$100 price line of demarcation.

It will be interesting to see if my theory is right. If so, we may see a sudden boom in the publishing industry, with a wealth of out-of-print titles as well as many new titles made available to those reading titles on one or another type of ebook reader.
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Duncan Long is a freelance book cover illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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