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As a student double majoring in English and Journalism, I often get people asking me what I want to do with my future if I don’t teach. I reply that I want to go into book publishing, and most of the time people respond with warnings that the print book and news industry is dying and that I should focus my time and efforts in the digital world. Because of this, I wanted to make a few charts representing just how much the introduction of the eBook and digital publishing is influencing the publishing industry. I was curious as to whether eBooks really were taking over and becoming the norm.

The first issue I found after choosing this topic was collecting data. I would have preferred to have data that went all the way back to the introduction of the eBook, but could only find detailed data for 2014. When I did manage to find the data, it didn’t tell me much. It basically showed that eBooks are a relevant and important part of the market, but they still haven’t overtaken print books and don’t appear to be poised to do that anytime soon. So my challenge was to take data that was showing that nothing was really changing in the market and make it newsworthy. I decided to make the point that nothing is changing the newsworthy aspect of the data. I wanted to show that eBooks were important to the publishing industry, but they don’t appear to be causing the death of the print book anytime soon.

Overall, I am generally happy with my graphics. I only wish I would have been able to find data that goes further back to really show the full eBook trend. I also like that I represented the pie chart as a stack of books, but I would have liked to represent some of the data more creatively.