By Robert Lockard

Are books about to take a quantum leap forward? I just read an excellent article on CNN called, “E-books catching on with readers.” I’ve covered this topic before on the eHarbor Blog, and much of what I read in this article harkened back to the thoughts I offered in my blog entry, “Will Kindle hurt book publishers?” In that blog post, I focused solely on the Kindle DX, but now many other companies are jumping into the fray.

The e-book industry certainly looks promising. It’s attracting top booksellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, as well as tech giants like Apple, Google and Sony. Technological advances keep coming, making e-books thinner, easier on the eyes and more affordable every year. In fact, according to the article, they could become as thin as a piece of paper within the next five years. That sounds amazing!

The reason I am so excited about this development is that it has the power to dramatically cut printing costs and open the doors to up-and-coming authors to show off their work. Imagine someone writing a great work of fiction and selling it through Amazon at a fraction of the price it would be if it had to be printed, shipped and stored. That author could start earning revenue almost immediately.

This also gives new opportunities to people engaged in ecommerce. Instead of having to mail cumbersome documents about their services to customers, they might be able to offer them in digital form. I know this is already done via email and on websites, but they could become more mobile and they wouldn’t have to be printed out if they could be accessed on an e-book.

Right now, e-books only account for about 3 percent of the revenue earned by the publishing industry. But industry insiders, like Book Oven CEO Hugh McGraw, are expecting their share of the publishing industry to grow to as much as 20 percent in 2014. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for the publishing industry.

Aren’t you glad to be living in the future?

This blog entry is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post, “E-books on the verge of explosive growth” The photo of the e-book inside a book is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of timonoko.

By Robert Lockard

The Bing decision engine is the most-visible sign of competition between Microsoft and Google, but the two technology giants are competing in many ways besides their search engines. And online companies and users are benefiting from their rivalry.

According to a Wired magazine article, “Google vs. Microsoft: What you need to know,” there are several ways Microsoft and Google are trying take market share from each other. I’ll discuss how some of those ways could be good for us who work in ecommerce and Internet marketing.

For instance, Google’s online advertising services, through Adsense, have taken pay-per-click campaigns to a new level. This service allows many websites to post paid-search ads from Google and earn money when someone clicks on one of them. This allows these sites to translate visitors into revenue, and it also helps Google earn money on its advertising campaigns. Web marketers benefit from the added exposure, allowing them to reach more online users than ever before.

Microsoft is trying to get into this market with Bing cashback. It has yet to become profitable, like Google, in the arena of online advertising, but the additional competition could mean lower advertising rates and better service for Internet marketers. I discussed Bing at length in an eHarbor Blog entry, “Bing decision engine good for online marketing.”

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has already had plenty of competition from Mozilla Firefox, Google’s new Chrome browser is sure to push them to innovate even more.

By the way, as I read this article, I noticed a glaring grammatical error that called out for me to comment on. Here’s the sentence:

It is, however, not a death match — it’s more of an fight to see who will be the King of Technology…

So close. By the way, this is a complete version of the blog entry on the eHarbor Blog: “Google-Microsoft face-off benefits ecommerce.” The Google vs. Microsoft photo is from Flickr, and it is courtesy of michperu.