Summary

We’ve looked at how ebooks took off and what qualities made them successful. We learned that:

• The biggest action today is centred on ebooks that follow the Amazon Kindle or EPUB format. These have widely-available e-readers and the biggest marketing and distribution channels to support them.
• Plain narrative works reach the widest audience and are still the most commercially successful.
• Viable options are emerging for textbooks, magazines, and illustrated books but this landscape remains fragmented without a clear standard emerging yet.
• We’ve mapped out some directions that early adopters can follow, including revisions to the popular Kindle and EPUB formats.

In the rest of this course, we’ll focus mainly on the narrative formats that dominate today’s ebook market.