[chrissy]

The article Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair in the New York Times today covers the growth in consumer awareness around electronic book reading devices, some publishers' reactions to this being a possible tipping point for the electronic book, and the fears of some booksellers who view this as a threat to their businesses.

Some interesting paragraphs from the article:

Much of the talk was focused on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, which has gained widespread acclaim for its ease of use. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, spent much of a packed session on Friday evangelizing about the Kindle, which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic formats.

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. "It certainly does feel like a threat," said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.

Nearly all publishers say their sales of electronic books are growing exponentially. Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said its sales of electronic books will more than double this year compared to last year, after growing 40 percent in 2007 from 2006. David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, said his company sold more electronic books in the first four months of 2008 than in all of last year.

Much of the expected growth in electronic books can be tied to the Kindle. When Amazon introduced the product, it sold out of the machines on the first day. The company needed months to adjust its manufacturing capacity and supply chain to be able to keep Kindles in stock, which Mr. Bezos said it has now accomplished.

The chief competitor to the Kindle is the Sony Reader, which has been on the market since 2006 and has also helped boost sales of electronic books. Some technology critics have given the early advantage to the Kindle, however, which downloads books, daily newspapers and magazines wirelessly; the Sony Reader downloads content via a wired connection.

The reluctance of Amazon and Sony to release sales figures continues to make the claims of various parties difficult to substantiate, resulting in contradictory statements such as the following --

But he also claimed that Kindle users are buying more books, not simply exchanging one format for another. He said that after buying a Kindle, Amazon customers purchase just as many physical books and two and a half times as many books overall, or three electronic books for every two physical copies.

Some publishing executives dispute that claim. "We don’t see people buying both versions," Mr. Shanks said. "I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization."

But neither Amazon nor Sony will say how many of their products they have sold, making it impossible for publishers to assess the size of the market or for bookstore owners to evaluate the threat.

One publisher estimated that Amazon had sold roughly 10,000 Kindles, while another estimated that as many as 50,000 electronic-book readers of all types are in general circulation. But both publishers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that those figures were little more than educated guesses.