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"Mainstream Acceptance"
A few months ago, Amazon proclaimed that ebooks were outselling hardcovers in the US; now they're outselling paperbacks. Soon they will likely outsell all paper versions.
How many ebook readers are out there? At a very rough and conservative guess:
- Assuming that Amazon did sell close to 8 million Kindles in 2010, we might say that there are about 12 million Kindles in current use.
- I have no clue how many Nooks, Sonys and other devices sold. Let's be conservative and say 5 million of those are in current use.
- Apple sold about 8 million iPads, and there are lots of smartphones out there. Let's presume that 1 million people use an iPad or smartphone and don't own another ebook reader.
- There are approximately 65 million Americans currently buy books.
So, we could be looking at as many as 18 million ebook device owners, out of 65 million book buyers, in the US -- or a little over 25% of the book buying population. This may be too optimistic, but could well be the case by the end of 2011.
Would either of these benchmarks -- 25% of buyers own ebook devices / ebooks outsell all paper -- qualify as ebooks going "mainstream," in the US at least? Or is there some other standard that makes more sense?
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