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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
All it shows is that Amazon's online sales are growing -- in a linear fashion since 2006 by the way -- while two brick & mortar stores are stalling.
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Which was my point - people are moving to on-line purchasing of paper books which, in my view, will make the switch to ebook purchase easier and more natural. I'm suggesting that a shift away from bricks-and-mortar stores to on-line sales prepares the way for ebook adoption.
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Again, I'm not seeing this as exponential growth. In fact, the growth looks largely linear dating back to late 2008. See for yourself -- growth in each quarter going back to Q4 2008 is about $10 million per quarter. (Prior to that, it was around $5m per quarter for over a year.) Healthy, but definitely closer to linear than exponential.
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You used an illustration where the increase since last January was applied linearly, which I think is unlikely.
I think that it's right to counsel caution about where this might go, because it could sharply continue to 6% and then plateau for 5 years, just as it could move to be market dominant in 3 years. Still, it looks likely to me that ebooks are set to become a significant slice of the pie for the first time very soon.
I'm not convinced that publishers are moving nearly fast enough to react to this. Making back-catalogues available at the current quality would be easy and cheap, and provide a dominant position in the ebook space for the publishers who were prepared to do it.