Silver Back Muzik

The large variety of e-readers, tablets and smart phones that can download and store e-books is having a major impact on the demand for e-books. E-books or digital books have already outpaced the sale of hardback and paperback books combined on Amazon. For a number of reasons, this trend is expected to keep growing and should be a great benefit for most of us.

Over 1 million books, magazines and newspapers are already available on Amazon alone in digital form and Apple and Barnes & Noble certainly don't intend to miss out on this massive market. These e-books can be accessed by e-readers, computers, tablets and smart phones.

The newly released Kindle reader from Amazon offers a 6 inch display screen, Wi-Fi, 2 gigabytes of storage and can hold 1,400 e-books in its memory. All these features are available for only $79 which now opens this market to many more customers than the more expensive previous models.

If you want more functionality from a reader that is readily available too. Amazon releases its new tablet, the Kindle Fire, on November 15. It offers a 7 inch full-color touch screen, dual core processor, web browsing, movies, music, free cloud storage, millions of available books and 8 GB of internal storage. One of the most impressive features of this tablet is that it is only $199 and the huge demand for this tablet has even stunned Amazon.

Barnes & Noble is also about to release its Nook tablet at a price of $250 and of course Apple has the iPad2 which starts at $499. Panasonic is also about to release its tablets. The 10 inch Toughpad will reportedly be priced at $1,299. So no matter how demanding you are, you should be able to find a reading device that can fit both your needs and your budget.

Although all of these reading devices are very impressive and may be on your Christmas wish list, if you just want access to these e-book resources you are in luck. Amazon offers free Kindle Reader apps for your computer (PC & Mac) and even smart phones that allow you to access this growing mass of knowledge and entertainment available in e-books. Even most best selling novels are now available as e-books for discounted prices.

Amazon Cloud storage for your e-books is also now available on the Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers.

This e-book technology is a wonderful convenience for our personal entertainment and reference needs but imagine the huge improvements it could soon mean to our school and university systems. Students could have all their textbooks stored on an easy to carry reader or tablet instead of wrestling with a heavy backpack everyday. Any time a text needed to be updated, the changes could simply be made over the Internet instead of the expense of buying a new edition of a hardback textbook.

I'm sure that there will be a lot of resistance from the textbook publishers but there are just too many advantages for this new technology not to succeed. Just look at how laptop computers have become indispensable in schools over the last few years.

Another surprising development with the massive growth in the e-book market is a challenge for Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple to meet the increasing demand for new content. Over the past three years e-book sales have increased by 1,247% and sales are expected to triple from the current level over the next three years.

This has presented a great opportunity for aspiring authors, writers and experts to get their work exposed to millions of readers seeking information and entertainment. Some have already become wealthy from writing how-to tutorials, novels and short stories that sell on Amazon from $0.99 to $9.99. One 26 year old woman, Amanda Hocking, has become a millionaire pumping out romantic fantasy adventures that her young audience devours in huge numbers.

Whether you are looking for some expert instruction, a good story or an audience for your writing, the quickly expanding e-book tidal wave can be your solution.