To grasp the size of the fortune that e-books can earn–if the industry tears down the Tower of eBabel and ends other follies–consider the Internet’s rise among young people.
“The most recent Pew Internet Project survey finds that 87% of all youth between the ages of 12 and 17 use the internet,” says the Pew Internet and American Life Project via Gary Price’s Resources Shelf blog. “That translates into about 21 million people. Of those 21 million online teens, 78% (or about 16 million students) say they use the internet at school. Put another way, this means that 68% of all teenagers have used the internet at school. This represents growth of roughly 45% over the past four years from about 11 million teens who used the internet in schools in late 2000.”
This is the generation brought up in front of computer screens. Now is the time to woo them as consumers. Instead, however, we’ve got the Tower of eBabel along with other problems such as the refusal of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling to try the digital format.
