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Originally Posted by LazyScot
I'd definitely want this analysis to be true. Which from experience means it is widely optimistic.
The 6% of books available is interesting, but I'd really like to know more about the breakdown of those c. 125,000 books. The reason is that I think some books are much more likely to be bought in electronic format than others (and I'm not convinced that all those 125,000 books are really available in both formats [in roughly equivalent time frames]). This will skew any prediction on likely sales which assume that one day all books (except, possibly, Beedle the Bard) become available electronically.
In the same vein, it would be interesting to have a breakdown of the buying habits of Kindle owners -- if they (I wish I could say us) consume books at the same rate oil companies make money, then the 6% might be a little high. [Hint: predicting corporate tax income for an entire economy based on the profitability of oil companies may results in minor budgetary errors.]
Finally I think we are still a little bit away from an "E-Ink iPod". It sounds like an excellent device, but the underlying technology probably needs another generation to hit the point at which it can really capture the imagination.
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Hell, getting really fine-grained breakdowns of sales numbers from publishers is like getting 'free samples of gold' from Fort Knox - it just ain't in the cards.
(You'd think you were asking them to release secrets on how to build an atom bomb or something.)
That said, I'd be willing to bet that some titles being released as e-books are "well, we've already peaked on hard-cover and mass-market paperback sales and the numbers don't warrant a new print run, so let's toss it out on the e-book market just to see if anything happens" releases. I also believe that they tend to want to see, on the new releases of big-name authors, the same kind of "massive" sales figures they see from dead-tree versions, this despite the disparity between dead-tree readership and electronic readership.
And I think they're seeing across-the-title-spectrum rise on ebook sales, but they're not seeing the 'buying frenzy' on specific titles because we electronic readers are so starved for new titles that we'll buy way out of our normal reading patterns just to have titles to read. (I know *I* have vastly widened my reading patterns now that I have my Cybook.)
Derek