As the holiday season nears, e-readers are among the devices which people want to receive or get for themselves.  Next month, the Amazon Kindle Fire will be on the market, and it looks like a lot of people want to get their hands on the new tablet, though some say more people would buy the Kindle e-reader than the Kindle Fire.  We won’t know the real score until the tablet goes on sale.

The amount of data consumed on mobile devices greatly increased as more kinds of connected devices become available to consumers.

According to comScore’s Senior VP of Mobile Mark Donovan, “The popularization of smartphones and the introduction of tablets and other web-enabled devices – collectively termed ‘connected devices’ – have contributed to an explosion in digital media consumption.

“As these devices gain adoption, we have also seen the rise of the ‘digital omnivores’ – consumers who access content through several touchpoints during the course of their daily digital lives.  In order to meet the needs of these consumers, advertisers and publishers must learn to navigate this new landscape so they develop cross-platform strategies to effectively engage their audiences.”

Digital book publishers are taking advantage of consumers’ appetite for e-books by adding new features to keep readers hooked.  Amazon launched 47North, the seventh imprint from Amazon Publishing, which will feature books with a science fiction, fantasy and horror theme. 47North launched with 15 books, including “The Mongoliad: Book One,” the first in the ambitious, five-book, collaborative Foreworld series led by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. All of these books will be available to Kindle readers in print and audio formats, as well as at national and independent booksellers.

A new trend on the rise is the bite-size e-singles.  Hearst Corporation, one of the nation’s largest diversified media companies, aims to entice readers with an e-single offering to tease buyers into purchasing the entire book.  You see, e-singles are like excerpts or short chapters in a book.  If it’s a cookbook, it can be one recipe.  After purchasing that one recipe, you’ll be intrigued as to what other great food the cookbook has to offer.  Way to apply music’s long tail affect on publishing.

Hearst’s creative director David Kang said that their introduction of large cookbooks led them “to find parts of the audience that might be more focused,” so they introduced the e-singles.  When asked if they will go exclusive with Nook since e-singles debuted here Kang said they want to be available for everyone but “there are instances where the retailer wants to be able to do a special promotion.”

And this e-book innovation will surely make e-readers love digitals books more than paperback novels, Montgomery writer Patrick Brian Miller, creator of the Southeastern Literary Tourism Initiative, aims to make e-readers interactive.  So when you’re reading a romance novel set in Paris, there would be a link in the novel that takes you exactly where the scene is happening, so you can see how the place ties up the whole scene.  No need to keep imagining places you’ve never seen in person before.

Making interactive e-books is still in the planning phase but Miller’s hope is high as more digital devices keep surfacing the market.  Aside from making reading really fun, Miller’s vision will help promote tourism especially for those remote and secluded paradises that the world needs to know about.  Miller already showed his idea to a bunch of people, mostly friends and colleagues, and while some are skeptic, most are quite interested and excited about the idea.  He wants people to spread the word about his project to see if it will be well received by his audience.  “I’m trying to create a market,” Miller said. “When they see it, they get excited.”