| Abstract [eng] |
New technologies have an immense impact on contemporary business world. The music industry‘s late reaction to the new technological and informational innovations resulted in severe damage to the industry. Similar outcome can be expected in book publishing as well and it is not surprising that digital publishing is already being titled as The New Gutenberg. The popularity of technologically advanced e-book reading devices is rapidly growing in foreign markets, however in Lithuania this process is only starting. The main object of this master‘s thesis was e-book reading devices. Purpose – to study e-book reading devices and determine their impact on Lithuanian book publishing business. In order to achieve this purpose the following has been done: a) Research on global expansion of the usage of e-book reading devices, its impact on world‘s book publishing business and prospects of this process; b) Evaluation of the scale to which predictions of the global development of digital publishing can apply to Lithuanian publishing business; c) Research of the development of digital publishing business in Lithuania and its comparison to foreign markets; d) Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted and later used as a basis for a prediction on prospects of digital publishing in Lithuania. Methodologies used: descriptive, special typological, qualitative and quantitative analysis and analogy. World tendencies show that e-book reading devices are promoting digital publishing and therefore it is expected that the industry is going to go up in the upcoming 5 years. Currently world‘s market has two main competitors in digital publishing and those are Amazon and Google. In Lithuania there are only few companies whose main area of business is digital publishing and the main works they are publishing are of the informative or educational nature. However, a part of all digital editions is created by users themselves without a permission from a publisher or an author. Currently only one company is officially distributing e-book reading devices which have Lithuanian interface. During this research the following hypotheses were absolutely confirmed: • Potential users are not informed about the new invention; • Digital books are scarce in Lithuanian market; • The price of e-book reading device is currently too high for Lithuanian users. Partly confirmed was a hypothesis that e-book reading devices are not developed enough and do not completely satisfy users‘ reading needs. Moreover, it was partly confirmed that for the upcoming 5 years Lithuanian publishers are not going to convert all or half of their production into a digital format. The main reason for this being illegal copying and distribution. |
