March 4 to 11 is “Read an E-Book Week”, a week set aside to promote and publicize all the benefits of e-book reading. Dorrance Publishing, Rose Dog Books, Red Lead Press and Whitmore Publishing along with Sony Canada, E-Ink, Smashbooks, Warren Adler, and many others are partnering with Gogreenreade.com to promote reading e-books during this week and through the campaign. The traditional book publishing industry is in the doldrums, but sales of e-books are up sharply. Traditional books are losing ground at the alarming rates of 4 to 13 percent per month. By contrast, e-book sales for the first 11 months of 2008 were up 64 percent. It is hard to ignore the growing impact of this phenomenon in the publishing industry.E-books were originally thought of as electronic files that could be downloaded and read on computer screens.

But as time has gone on and the technology has evolved, e-books are most often read on e-book readers today. The most popular are the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. Amazon.com offers 230,000 titles for sale in e-book form, and currently 10 percent of the sales of those titles are in e-books. The future of e-book publishing will involve more platforms and devices and greater ease of downloading. Some devices can already connect for downloading through mobile phones. The Kindle Reader uses a “paper page” format that is currently only in black and white. But colored “paper pages” will be available in the future.Google has announced that 1.5 million books in the public domain that it had scanned and made available for download on PCs are now available for downloading on mobile devices such as the iPhone and T-Mobile G1. Downloading printed materials occurs more quickly on wireless networks. And more books, some in copyright and in print, will soon be available on Google Book Search with permission of the rights holders.

The benefits of e-books include economy, ease of purchase, portability, the amount of storage available on the reading devices, and the impact on the environment. The carbon footprint of printed books includes pulp from trees, chemicals, returns clogging landfills, and the exhaust generated by transporting books from publishers to bookstores or customers. With e-books, files are downloaded electronically and read on a reader. Nothing is printed, transported, or disposed of. For all these reasons, it makes good sense to set aside a week to consider purchasing and reading an e-book, or at least developing an interest in them and becoming more informed about their possibilities.

Dorrance, and its various imprints, will provide a different free e-book each day of Read an E-Book Week. Consumers simply need to visit dorrancebookstore.com to claim a free e-book each day.Along with other publishers, Dorrance, Rose Dog, Red Lead, and Whitmore online bookstores will be highlighting and featuring e-books and promoting the event through the use of banners in all the companies’ bookstore sites.

Those interested in purchasing e-books can visit Google Book Search, Amazon.com, and the Dorrance, Rose Dog, Red Lead, and Whitmore bookstores or may go to www.ebookweek.com for more information about the “Read an E-Book Week” campaign.