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Originally Posted by fjtorres
But that is the total book market. It includes textbooks, coffee table books, etc.
Narrative text reading, the penetration is much higher: Romance is well over 50%. SF and Fantasy not far behind. LitFic much lower.
How important ebooks are is a function of the genre.
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Those 2 genres (romance and sf/fantasy) are the home genres of a lot of really voracious readers. People who read mostly litfic read fewer books. Yeah, these litfic readers may be elite and read a lot compared to the average person, but they don't read several hundred books or more a year like voracious genre readers do.
To quote Charlie Stross:
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The voracious 20-150 books/year readers are a small but significant market segment.
These people buy lots of titles. They frequently have specialized interests which they pursue in depth, and a large number of authors who, although not prominent, they will buy everything by. They frequently re-read books, and they are disproportionately influential on other customers because they enthuse about what they've read. They're particularly common in genre fiction. Previously they bought paperbacks and hardcovers from specialist genre bookstores or, failing that, from large B&N/Borders branches. They will go to whatever retailer they can find online, and they find DRM a royal pain in the ass — indeed, a deterrent to buying ebooks at all.
There is a pervasive assumption that ebooks are disposable literature. But to the voracious readers, this is not the case. Currently it's hard for many people to build up collections of books due to space constraints — nevertheless I know many SF fans (of the kind who read 50-150 books a year) who have turned their homes into libraries. They will be the tip of an iceberg once ebooks become mainstream; why discard an ebook when you can file it and come back to it in 10 years' time and it takes up no space?
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These are also the people who present the ongoing market for e-ink readers (and yes, I'm one of them).