The relatively sudden increase in the popularity of e-books has some major implications for the future of publishing. As a result of the growing popularity of e-book readers – such as the Amazon Kindle for instance – e-books have rapidly been accepted by the public. It would be easy to view them as little more than another way to deliver written content. However, they may well be the biggest change to reading since the printing press was invented.

Perhaps that sounds a little melodramatic – but the fact is that e-books totally change the long established publishing cycle. In general, publishers release hardback editions followed, normally a few months to a year later, by the paperback version. It seems obvious that there is no reason why an e-book edition shouldn't be released simultaneously with the hardback.

E-books don’t use any paper, chemicals or bindings, and they don’t require to be shipped - so they cost much less than a traditional printed book. That means that the e-book edition could be made available at a pretty low price at the same time as the hardback version. That could have a serious impact on the profits of the big publishing houses – especially if you consider that the people who own e-book readers are likely to be fairly heavy readers.

There have already been some fairly heated discussions between Amazon – who wanted to price all e-books at $ 9.99 or lower – and the publishers. All books by the McMillan publishing house were even withdrawn from the Amazon website at one point. Whilst things have quietened down a little for the – it appears highly probable that e-book prices will fall further in future.

However, there are clearly some very positive aspects for the major publishing houses. Publishers will have lower costs when marketing e-books, so they should still be able to turn a profit. Alternative strategies for marketing books will also become available to them.

Amazon’s library of Kindle books is the largest available on the web at the moment. They have in excess of 700,000 titles available – and there are an additional 1.8 million books which are now out of copyright and con be downloaded for free direct from Amazon's Kindle store. Many of these were published before 1923, but you will find examples of very modern books which can be downloaded at no cost.

You can often see publishers offering modern, sometimes recently published, books for free. Often this will be done for a relatively brief period - a couple of weeks or so. It gives them the opportunity to showcase a new author or title and the increased number of downloads will help the book to rise up the best sellers list. After it has climbed the rankings, publishers can start charging for it and benefit from the added publicity. You may also find the first book in a series being made available for free. Obviously the theory is that readers will buy other titles in the series - if they enjoyed it.

It's true that both of these marketing techniques could, conceivably, have been used with traditional books. However, it would be a costlier, and therefore riskier, undertaking. It seems obvious that e-books are going to be a permanent addition to the publishing landscape. There will be some publishers who will attempt to maintain their profits by using somewhat restrictive measures. It will be the ones that are best able to adapt to the new digital publishing landscape by offering value to both authors and readers who survive.