A shocking trend lately in the printing industry is the rapid and almost meteoric shift from print to ebooks in the publishing industry.  Now this isn't something that the publishers have been pushing, but rather the readers.  Sure, there's been some generous nudges from a number of different directions encouraging people to go the ebook route, but most of that has come from the various vendors making ebook readers.  The most notable of these is Amazon.

But in the process of this titanic shift, there's been a number of both winners, and losers, who have either gained immeasurably from this shift, or lost their shirts. (or will very soon)  So who are some of these people?  Well, among the winners are the manufacturers of ebook readers.  They're making out like gangbusters as the market expands and grows.  But it's not all roses and lollipops for them as there's getting to be a LOT of competition as the number of devices and applications that can read ebooks is growing.

Another big winner is the book chains who sell books.  I'm thinking companies like Amazon, B&N and others.  Ebooks mean less physical inventory, smaller overhead, less physical footprint, and greater streamlining of all operations.  Add that to all the nature lovers out there who hate the idea that trees are being killed left and right to provide the world with print media.  If the print book industry shrunk to a tiny niche market, or disappeared altogether, I know that they'd be probably the happiest of all.

On the middle ground is companies like Ingram who are the middleman distributors between the publishing companies and the book sellers.  Their primary bread and butter has been print books.  However, they were wise enough to step into the distribution of ebooks early on and now handle both mediums for publishers, as well as the other more traditional mediums, such as audio books (both digital and physical disk) and hard covers.  While they are likely to shrink in importance in the coming years (due to the ability of publishers to go directly to the distributors), they will not die out like some facets of the industry will.

Some of the big losers will be stores like grocers, department stores, bookstores and others who currently sell print books in their stores.  They are going to lose big on this as the print market shrinks.  Thankfully everyone, save the physical bookstores, will be able to simply shift away from selling any kind of books or magazines, and quite possibly offer ebooks in their story on some form of kiosk system.  Although if current trends are any indication, even that attempt at book selling will ultimately flop given the ease of one click search and purchase technology on the web and any web enabled devices.

Another group that will be hurt a lot is the printers.  IE, those companies whose main job is print media.  With everything going digital, their influence and business in the industry will be rapidly shrinking more and more over the coming months and years as ebooks continue to explode.  But as I stated above, there's a number of people who won't be the slightest bit disappointed at this happening.  Now one other thing that people have to consider is that in the end, everyone will be losers to some degree as ebooks continue to take off.  Why?

Well, consider this.  Books generate lots and lots of waste every year.  However, that waste is entirely biodegradable, which means it will rot away in a few years and make the soil happy.  (ignore the fact that there are toxic chemicals in the inks used to print the books, because nature takes care of that too, rendering them inert)  Ebooks on the other hand have no physical form and thus nothing to be wasted, or sent to pollute a landfill somewhere.  However, they generate an inordinate amount of e-waste.

What am I talking about?  Ereaders.  Be it your phone, your nook, your kindle, or whatever it is.  Ebook readers don't bio-degrade.  They go in the ground and just stay there.  Most aren't recycled, and all of them have toxic chemicals that pollute the soil and the water.  Sure, it's typically an average of one ereader per 1000 print books that finds its way into a landfill.  The problem is, since they don't bio-degrade, and are rarely recycled, they add up after a while, and eventually create even bigger problems than they solve.  But that's for future generations to deal with, right?  Hopefully not.  But that's a debate for another article.