A timeline of the ebook market growth (infographic)

Sep 16, 2016

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Ola Kowalczyk

45 years after the publication of the first ebook, print books are still twice as popular as electronic books in the US.

The history of ebooks is long and, in fact, not as impressive as you would have thought a few years ago.

Ribbonfish, the company that provides publishing and media solutions for the digital age, has released an infographic that lists milestones in the growth of ebook industry. You’ll see here the first ebook published on a floppy disc, Google Book Search program, and the launch of ebook subscription services, among others.

The infographic accompanies a detailed article that analyzes the future of bookshops in the digital age.

If you are looking for other visualization of the ebook industry, check out our classic infographic that shows the history of ebooks.

Click or tap the image below to see it enlarged.

More infographics to explore:

[ef-archive number=5 tag=”infographics”]

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An extroverted book lover, Ola embraces reading in all forms. She pairs a love of reading with outdoor routines, proving that stories belong everywhere from open trails to e-readers.

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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by CAL NEWPORT

I remember when I first encountered Facebook: It was the spring of 2004; I was a senior in college and began to notice an increasing number of my friends talk about a website called thefacebook.com. The first person to show me an actual Facebook profile was Julie, who was then my girlfriend, and now my wife.

“My memory of it was that it was a novelty,” she told me recently. “It had been sold to us as a virtual version of our printed freshman directory, something we could use to look up the boyfriends or girlfriends of people we knew.”

The key word in this memory is novelty. Facebook didn’t arrive in our world with a promise to radically transform the rhythms of our social and civic lives; it was just one diversion among many. In the spring of 2004, the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending significantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game that was inexplicably popular) than they were tweaking their profiles or poking their virtual friends.

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Get the ebook from Amazon, B&N, or Kobo.

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