Amazon, which got its start selling books online, announced this year that, for the first time, its digital books had outsold paper books.

以网上销售书籍创业的亚马逊，今年宣布，平台的电子书销量首次超过纸质书。

This trend of going digital does not hold true for all books: While many popular consumer books have successfully made the switch into the new format, textbooks are still widely read on paper.

数据化的趋势并不是对所有书而言都是真理，尽管热门的大众书籍已经成功地转入了新的样式，大部分情况下，教科书还是纸质的。

Textbooks are gaining, however, as publishers take advantage of the popularity of tablets like the Kindle and ipad, expanding their catalogues and offering products like rental digital books that expire after a semester or two.

然而，随着出版商们从Kindle和ipad等平板设备的热度中的获益，教科书也在拓展着目录并且提供在一两个学期内有效的可租借电子书。

The potential for digital growth is leading publishers to experiment with products that stretch the boundaries of traditional textbooks, slowly turning away from static text and images toward a multimedia, intuitive approach, publishers say.

有出版商说，电子化的增长潜力正在引领着出版商们实验着一些产品，这些产品能伸展出传统的教科书边界，缓慢地从静态的文本和图像转向一种多媒体化的，便捷的途径。

"Textbooks as e-books ought to be seen as a stepping stone to the future," said Mark Majurey of Taylor & Francis, a textbook publisher in Britain.

一位来自英国泰勒-弗朗西斯出版集团的教科书出版商，马克 ·马哲里说，作为电子书的教科书应该被认为是走向未来的一块里程碑。

Digital textbooks are any books that can be downloaded to an e-reader or computer or those that can be read online using a Web browser.

电子教科书是那些能够被下载到电子读书器或者是电脑，或者说能用浏览器在线阅读的书籍。

While no one keeps precise numbers of digital textbook sales globally, a number of companies have seen similar growth patterns and nearly identical market share.

尽管没有人有全球电子教科书的精确数据，大量的公司都有相似的增长模式和相近的市场份额。

According to the Student Monitor, a private student market research company based in New Jersey, about 5 percent of all textbooks acquired in autumn in the United States were digital textbooks. That is more than double the 2.1 percent of the spring semester.

根据“学生观察”，新泽西的一家私人的学生市场研究公司的数据，美国这个秋季，接近百分之五的所学的教科书是电子书。这比春季的百分之4.2还要多。

【美国电子教科书的支出持续增加，在高昂的教育材料费用问题长期存在的背景下，这种利用数字生产和分销的优势来降低消费者支出的全新方法可以为我们做个参考。】