There has been and continues to be a plethora of observational studies by different researchers in the publishing industry focused on how e-books have affected hard-copy book sales. Evidence from these studies has indicated that there is a significant and monumental shift away from hard-copy books to e-books.[1]These findings precipitate fears that hard-copy books might become more expensive in the near future as they begin to be less available.  This scenario could escalate to the point where only collectors of hard-copy books are willing to pay the high price for ownership.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, made a statement in July 2010 that sales of digital books had significantly outstripped U.S. sales of hard-copy. He claimed that Amazon had sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hard-back books over the past three months. The pace of this change was unprecedented;  Amazon said that in the four weeks of June 2010, the rate of sales had reached 180 e-books for every 100 hard-backs sold. Bezos said sales of the Kindle and e-books had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books.[2] Earlier in July 2010, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m e-books to date.

According to a report made by Publishers Weekly, for the first quarter of 2011, e-book sales were up 159.8%; netting sales of $233.1 million. Although adult hard-cover and mass market paperback hard-copies had continued to sell, posting gains in March, all the print segments had declined for the first quarter with the nine mass market houses that report sales. Their findings revealed a 23.4% sales decline, and that children’s paper-back publishers had also declined by 24.1%.[3] E-book sales easily out-distanced mass market paperback sales in the first quarter of 2011 with mass market sales of hard-copy books falling to $123.3 million compared to e-books’ $233.1 million in sales.

According to .net sales report by the March Association of American Publishers (AAP) which collected data and statistics from 1,189 publishers, the adult e-Book sales were $282.3 million in comparison to adult hard-cover book sales which counted $229.6 million during the first quarter of 2012. During the same period in 2011, eBooks revenues were $220.4 million.[4] These reports indicate a disconcerting diminishing demand for hard-copy books.

Python is an incredibly powerful and useful computer programming language that many of the biggest websites in the world rely on for their foundation. Python provides reliable results that are functional and involve a variety of dynamic scripted and non-scripted contexts. And because it is free and open source, it has remained a popular choice for a variety of different developers who are looking to build new sites on one of the most reliable languages available. Here is a look at 10 of the most famous software programs that are written in Python and what they do.

YouTube
If you love watching hours of homemade and professional quality video clips on YouTube, you can thank Python for giving you that option. The foundation for Python helped YouTube integrate streaming videos into their pages, as well as the ability to like videos and embed certain information. YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and it runs off of one of the most powerful languages in Python.

DropBox
What started as a powerful app, DropBox is now used by a variety of individuals, businesses, companies, organizations and more. This program lets you save files to a cloud-based service, that you can then access from anywhere in the world. With Python at the root of DropBox, there is no longer a need for USB sticks or blank CDs, since you can now save and share everything with your cloud-based account.

Google
It takes a lot of power to be able to handle the most popular search engine in the entire world. That is why Google uses Python for its mainframe foundation, as well as in addition to various apps that it runs in conjunction with the main site. The ease that Google provides for finding certain information, would be impossible without Python at the core.

Quora
Got a question? Ask it on Quora. This site compiles a list of questions and answers that come from a community of individuals. Those questions are then organized by various members of the community, which puts the most relevant information at the top. The creators of Quora, who happened to be former Facebook employees, decided to use Python to help them create the world’s best Magic 8 ball in Quora.

Instagram
If you love taking photos of your food or a new outfit and posting it online for all of your friends to see, you can thank Python for that ability. Granted, Instagram has both a very powerful app and a website, but the latter runs on Python language. The system allows for users to browse, find and post pictures that they like on the site.

BitTorrent
BitTorrent has evolved quite a bit in recent years, but its foundation and earlier years were built on Python. When it comes to one of the largest databases of knowledge, media and content, BitTorrent is the way to go. But you wouldn’t be able to get any of those lectures or other legal stuff that you are downloading from BitTorrent, if it wasn’t for Python.

Spotify
Spotify changed the music game when it allowed you to listen to ad-free music of your choice. This wasn’t a program where you got to select a playlist, but rather full songs that you love, on repeat as many times as you can imagine, if you so desire. But whether you are rocking out to the latest K-Pop song from Psy or a classic jazz tune, you are doing so because Spotify was built on Python.

Reddit
Reddit is one of the biggest open communities on the web. You have a question, want to talk about something in specific, or find tons of information regarding a particular topic, you can just look on Reddit. The site relies on Python to help them store user names, categorize subreddits, upload links to GIFs and, of course, award gold to valued posters.

Yahoo Maps
Much like Google, Yahoo also uses Python for a variety of different resources. Most valued may be Yahoo Maps. The API and programming behind the maps program, which is built with Python, allows for users to find locations, get directions and even find reviews about local places.

Hipmunk
If you love to travel, you have likely come across Hipmunk. And while the site lets you save money on booking your itinerary through Hipmunk, it is Python that keeps everything organized. Python also helps sort the best discounts and rates, so you can get the best packages available.

Python is an incredibly powerful tool for web development. More and more sites rely on it, including 10 of the most powerful sites in the world that are listed here.

Related:

Current Active List of Organizations that use Python 

Working With Lists In Python

Sometimes we have to repeat ourselves before we are heard. Then again there are times where we have to perform a certain action the same way several times before we can carry on with what we want to do.

Repetition is the keyword here and for humans that is something we generally try to avoid. Yet our digital friends love repetition. They never get tired and they never get bored of doing the same thing over and over again countless times.

So it’s little wonder then that all modern programming languages give us various ways in which we can perform a certain action as many times as we need.

In python we have the for statement which gives us the power to loop over large collections of data very quickly and efficiently.

Writing Python in Java syntax is possible with a semi-automatic tool. Programming code translation tools pick up about 75% of dynamically typed language. Conversion of Python to a statically typed language like Java requires some manual translation. The modern Java IDE can be used to infer local variable type definitions for each class attribute and local variable.


Translation of Syntax
Both Python and Java are OO imperative languages with sizable syntax constructs. Python is larger, and more competent for functional programming concepts. Using the source translator tool, parsing of the original Python source language will allow for construction of an Abstract Source Tree (AST), followed by conversion of the AST to Java.

Python will parse itself. This capability is exhibited in the ast module, which includes skeleton classes. The latter can be expanded to parse and source each node of an AST. Extension of the ast.NodeVisitor class enables python syntax constructs to be customized using translate.py and parser.py coding structure.

The Concrete Syntax Tree (CST) for Java is based on visit to the AST. Java string templates can be output at AST nodes with visitor.py code. Comment blocks are not retained by the Python ast Parser. Conversion of Python to multi-line string constructs with the translator reduces time to script.


Scripting Python Type Inference in Java
Programmers using Python source know that the language does not contain type information. The fact that Python is a dynamic type language means object type is determined at run time. Python is also not enforced at compile time, as the source is not specified. Runtime type information of an object can be determined by inspecting the __class__.__name__ attribute.

Python’s inspect module is used for constructing profilers and debugging.
Implementation of def traceit (frame, event, arg) method in Python, and connecting it to the interpreter with sys.settrace (traceit) allows for integration of multiple events during application runtime.

Method call events prompt inspect and indexing of runtime type. Inspection of all method arguments can be conducted. By running the application profiler and exercising the code, captured trace files for each source file can be modified with the translator. Generating method syntax can be done with the translator by search and addition of type information. Results in set or returned variables disseminate the dynamic code in static taxonomy.

The final step in the Python to Java scrip integration is to administer unsupported concepts such as value object creation. There is also the task of porting library client code, for reproduction in Java equivalents. Java API stubs can be created to account for Python APIs. Once converted to Java the final clean-up of the script is far easier.

Related:

 What Are The 10 Most Famous Software Programs Written in Python?

Python, a Zen Poem