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Originally Posted by CommonReader
The number of devices that can be used as readers is growing explosively; besides ebook readers there are iPads, Android tablets, smart phones etc.. Publishers will either serve that market or people will get their content from the darknet.
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Or publishers will serve that market *and*people will get content from the darknet. Like music. Exactly like music.
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They will not shrug their shoulders and remain with paper books just because the publishers refuse to serve the market. Publishers will earn some money selling ebooks or they will see reduced revenue because people will increasingly get their books illegally.
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Maybe. If publishers made no, say, German-language e-books available, I doubt that they would lose any noticeable amount of business simply due to the complexity of scanning and uploading books. It's much easier to just strip DRM from an already existing e-book.
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As has been pointed out already the growth of the ebook market does not compare favourably to the sales figures of reading devices (as far as these figures are known). That's despite the fact that such devices have been mostly bought by people from higher income groups up to now.
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1. It has been *asserted* that the growth of the ebook market does not compare favorably to the increase in sales. It has not been demonstrated at all. Show me the evidence that more than 3 times as many people own e-book readers now than did one year ago. Keep in mind that many people own multiple devices capable of reading e-books (I do), and that most people who buy an iPad don't use it to read books.
2. At some point, of course, e-book sales will level off, and the sales-per-reader number may decline. I haven't seen any evidence that this has happened yet, and I'm not even sure how meaningful this number is: there's certainly no reason to assume that people with e-book readers will all buy the same number of books.