More than a half-million new books – new titles, fiction and nonfiction – will be published this year. And that number’s going to go up next year and the year after and the year after that.

See, I can write a book on whatever subject I want and get it out there as an electronic book that you can buy for $1.99 from Amazon. My costs might be a couple hundred dollars. If I sell 300 books, I’ve made my out-of-pocket expenses back.

Hmmm, interesting.

Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace, says this ease of publishing is great for readers.

“There are more options,” he told NPR’s On the Media host Brook Gladstone recently. “There’s price competition, there’s format competition, there’s new ways to read. You can get things delivered faster. They’re accessible online. There’s more voices, there’s more communities to serve you. So for readers, it’s terrific.”

And readers are moving toward e-books.

Cader estimates that e-books so far this year make up about 8 percent of total book sales, buoyed by the iPad.

A National Endowment of the Arts study showed that two years ago 15 percent of us U.S. adults were reading literature online or on our e-readers or on our cell-phone screens. And a lot of us adult online readers are in the 18 to 24 age bracket. And that’s not a surprise. This group and our teenagers are the first adopters of new reading technology.

Monday – One more look at the future of the book