No Surprise: People Are Buying More E-books
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The e-book industry has a lot of momentum behind it at this point. Thanks to devices such as Kindle, NOOK, and iPad, more people are now feeling confident about investing in e-books instead of paper books. The fact that they don’t have to take a trip to a book store to buy their book (or have their books shipped to them) has helped e-books as well. Then there is the issue of the price. A report by Association of American Publishers shows that e-books have been gaining even more momentum while paper books are losing steam:
According to the February results, once again e-Books have enjoyed triple-digit percentage growth, 202.3%, vs February 2010. Downloaded Audiobooks, which have also seen consistent monthly gains, increased 36.7% vs last February.. For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.
The e-book industry still has long ways to go before maturing. There are many battles to be fought. The issue of piracy is going to be at the center stage of some of these battles in the future. Will publishers and authors go after e-book pirates just like the music industry did? We should not count it out, even though studies have shown that piracy could actually help authors gain visibility and more revenue over the long run.
E-reader prices are dropping. I would be surprised if Kindle is not selling for under $100 by the next year. Making the device free could potentially take the e-book business to a whole new level. But going by what Amazon has recently done with Kindle with offers, the company has some work to do to make the free Kindles idea a reality.
