It's hard to believe that in todays society, the most succesful modern book to be published was the Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling. other than this, the only other book to be this popular was the Holy Bible itself. this does not necessarily mean that it was the most well sold book but it also made more money than any other in movies and other franchises. Books have deffinatly come a long way from when they first had been created. Books had started back from Egyptian times when they had began experimenting with alphabets and they had struggled to find a way to preserve these written symbols. Books had started being written on things such as papyrus and then later in time moved to parchment. the chinese had also written things that closely resmbled book and they where the first to make paper and created a "codex" which was one of the first types of books.
Books today is a huge money making indusrty. An example of this is the billions of dollars exchanged from books today. College books generate up to 3.7 billion dollars every year. Proffessional books generate 3.4 billion dollars and EL-HI books create the most revenue with up to 6.4 billion dollars. This is a huge market which puts tons of money in tons of people's pockets because it involves so many people to generate all of these books. Theres one thing that will influence this in todays economy though. Ebooks and electronic media are starting to take over the industry. i think that in time even though people prefer a hard copy book, books are transferring online and what not. this in itself will start to decrease the amount of money being exchanged throughout our economy today.
Even though books are converting to online and electronic media, there are still things that help sell books today. Television and film industry influence things today and help people decide what books to purchase. this is not always a bad thing that books are being digitized. This is also helping the most recent trend of preserving and restoring older books. Books that are older and are written on acid based paper which in time deteriorates are targeted for preservation. this is not a big money industry but it is helping restoring our history itself.
Interesting 3rd point. 9 points.
ReplyDelete