Here's something interesting that goes along with this debate: Take a look at these searches at Technorati.com for the terms
ebooks ,
e-books, and
"ebook OR ebooks OR e-book OR e-books then note the small graphs on the left that show mentions by day for the past 30 days. There appears to be quite a spike for the term "ebooks" over the last few days that coincide with the Sony Reader announcement at CES. I'm trying to figure out a possible reason for the spike on 12/20 for both "e-books" and "ebooks", any ideas?? I wonder if the noticable spikes in the terms "ebooks" and "ebook OR ebooks OR e-book OR e-books" around the end of December and over the last few days are due to the
original story by BusinessWeek on the 29th about Sony's plans and the subsequent announcement at CES?
As time goes on and the Reader, Jinke Hanlin and iRex Iliad are released and people are buying e-books for these devices, I wonder if the mean(?) for mentions per day of for e-books will go up significantly (my statistics is rusty, so please forgive me). The mean mentions by day (MMBD) for "ebooks" appears to be between 75-100 mentions per day while the MMBD for "e-books" appears to be around 40-50 per day. The MMBD for "ebook OR ebooks OR e-book OR e-books" appears to be around 400 or so. All of these figures are based on the number of sites and links Technorati tracks, currently at 24.6 million sites and 1.9 billion links.
This is all just anecdotal evidence, but these numbers could be used as a baseline to measure the popularity of these terms over time.
Anyone with a background in statistics that can crunch the numbers and track these trends? Is there any other source of more complete data that could be used? (Edit: Found!)