OK peoples, pay attention.
I explicitly said that I expect ebook sales to rise faster moving forward than they did in 2009.
The critical point is that
despite the massive hype through most of 2009, ebook sales are still very small compared to the market as a whole.
Secondarily, this is likely to be the case for many years to come. So when you insist that the publishers are Luddites who ought to toss out their old business models, just keep in mind that over 95% of their revenues are still coming from paper.
Sorry, but this is a silly assertion.
If you follow this logic of "consistent 260% increases", ebooks would reach 100% market share by mid 2013. Revenues would go from a theoretical projection of $32m in 2009, to $80m in 2010, to $213m in 2011, to $556m in 2012. No one would consider that even remotely likely, let alone 50% market share by 2011.
I'm fairly confident that even with the structural advantages tilting towards ebook adoption, it is
much harder to increase revenues by $350m in a single year than by $20m.
It's very common for a new format or product to have huge percentages of increases early on -- and obviously "260%!" grabs more attention than "$20 million out of $900 million." If Ben's chart is remotely accurate, for example, you'd have seen 100%+ increases in 2004 and 2005 -- followed by shrinking sales for a time -- and
consistent $3-5m increases for most of 2008, and consistent $10m increases since Q4 2008. If that trend continues, annual ebook growth would go from 260% in 2009, down to 100% in 2010, then down to 50% in 2011. In this example, the "growth percentage" statistic would misrepresent a steady growth of ebooks.
And of course, let's not forget that there is huge pressure to reduce the price of ebooks, and that many ebooks are cheap or free. Things would look very different if we were looking at unit volumes instead of revenues.
In other words: Measuring the percentage of growth practically useless until the market, format or item has matured; and expecting consistent explosive growth is, to put it mildly, excessively optimistic.
Sorry, this chart doesn't prove anything.
It's not specific to ebooks; heck it isn't even specific to
books, as these retailers sell books, movies, music and other media. 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.
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.
Charts are handy, but they can obscure trends just as easily as illuminate them.