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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Make up your mind. If you "expect ebook sales to rise faster moving forward than they did in 2009."
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Correct, that's pretty much my position.
Similar to Ben, I expect high growth for a few years, then slower growth as the market matures.
Again, most of my purpose in this thread is to put the "zomg 260%!" into better perspective.
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Originally Posted by RSE
And 10% percent of any market, anywhere that is growing rapidly against the backdrop of stagnant competing sales is enough to cause a major sea change what is made. Any product, any time.
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By that logic, I presume that the market should focus laser-like attention on the Zune and Amazon's MP3 downloads, right? Gotcha.
In case you failed to notice it, the industry
is reacting to the situation. Publishers got extremely lucky and were offered the opportunity by Apple to radically alter the way their products are priced, and were smart enough to capitalize on that opportunity. Macmillan, at least, also claims they will put out all new books in electronic form the same day as paper is released. They're reviewing contracts to determine electronic rights. They may not be doing everything perfect, but almost no one has a 100% track record when dealing with disruptive technologies -- including high tech firms. (e.g. IBM vs Microsoft in the early days; Sun vs Linux; Myspace vs Facebook etc)
Retailers, including ones who are potentially cannibalizing their own businesses, are obviously pouring lots of resources into ebooks. Amazon is pouring money into developing Kindle devices and software, and subsidizing ebooks to gain market share. Both Amazon and B&N are leaping into a field that's new to them (manufacturing hardware). Apple has even granted book publishers far more control over pricing than the record labels ever got.
It's screamingly obvious that the industry is reacting to ebooks, and trying to deal with an extremely fluid situation without ripping their existing profit margins to shreds.
Not everything is perfect, particularly in terms of proofreading quality. But the idea that publishers are a bunch of Luddites who are trying to stop the juggernaut of ebooks is not a rational conclusion based on facts. It's prejudicial whinging by people who fail to realize that ebooks are still in an "early adopter" phase, still only make up 5% of the total market, may or may not threaten margins etc. -- yet they still demand all the services and attention as though ebooks make up 25% or 50% of the market.
Naturally it's easy to lose sight of this, if (like me) most of your book purchases are electronic. Couple that with an isolated and decontextualized statistic, and of course you assume that a multi-billion dollar market ought to revolve around your needs and cater to your whims.
Thus, and yet again, while it's a good thing that ebooks are making big gains, we ought to keep things in perspective, to wit:
• Ebooks are still a nascent market.
• It's still going to be years before the ebook segment matures.
• Ebooks will not dominate the market overnight.
• There are numerous other statistics to consider -- e.g. revenues, margins, volume, market segments, device adoption rates etc -- in order to form a more comprehensive understanding of the changes.