Today's e-book is a direct descendant of the 1930s paperback

I realize that in terms of publishing news I’ve posted a bunch of Ipad articles lately, and today will be no different. HOWEVER, this article (Article) tends to validate the rationale behind the Ipad centric blog posts. This article was written by the CEO of Penguin Publishing.

I did not know that Penguin started by contracting with larger publishing houses, to produce paperbacks of their novels. Apparently, Penguin was the first one to aggressively market paperback books. This article states that the same revolution in publishing that Penguin began in paperback books, will be seen via the Ipad in the coming months and years. “Today's e-book is the direct descendent of the 1930s paperback.”

The most relevant passage I found was this: “Allen Lane founded Penguin in 1935 on the basis of a brilliant and simple idea. He would buy the rights to publish paperback books from established hardback publishers for not much money, package the books beautifully, and then sell them around the world at a ridiculous price—sixpence in the U.K. Many years later, Jeff Bezos invented an even more creative, and much more profitable, model for the distribution of physical and digital books. He called it Amazon. Today's e-book is a direct descendant of the 1930s paperback. Like its predecessor, it should be less expensive than a hardcover book as it costs almost nothing to produce, and the rights can be acquired separately from other formats. Amazon has quite legitimately pursued the same logic as Allen Lane, buying up exclusive digital rights directly from authors and agents, and pricing its best-selling e-books at $9.99, a huge discount compared to the price of the competing hardback."

The good news, according to the author was this quote “This was true of book clubs, of superstores, and of online retailers, and it will be true of digital platforms. So our authors will sell more of their work, pirates permitting.”