Amazon may enjoy as much as $2.5B in global e-books sales in 2012, says Steve Weinstein, an analyst at Pacific Crest. Like Peter Kent, he is extrapolating from the history of MP3s.
Remember? Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, thinks that e-book-related sales at some point will become three or four percent of the present worldwide book market of $90B.
For the sake of e-books, let’s hope these optimists are right. I can recall similar excitement before the dotcom bust, so I’ll sit this one out.
Lots of ifs
Keep in mind that the issue isn’t just how well Amazon will do, but also its competitors. Some might thrive at the expense of Bezos and friends. What if, out of the blue, a newcomer like Astak outKindles the Kindles through alliances with giants like Costco or Walmart? Or suppose company X or Y makes disruptive alliances with innovative screen-producer Z, and it isn’t PVI, Amazon’s supplier.
Even on the content front, Amazon isn’t entirely secure. I can see Sony continuing to team up with various retailers and perhaps doing a lot of damage. Suppose Sony can embrace ePub all the way—not just on its machines but at the content end—and also can retreat from DRM. Or how about the replacement of traditional DRM with social DRM? Remember when everyone felt that Sony would insist on proprietary tech all the way? Sony needs to keep in mind that that Amazon itself runs a DRMless MP3 store. Please, Sony—surprise us.
Other links of interest:
—PW reports on e-rotica, complete with a quote from Raelene Gorlinsky of Ellora’s Cave: "It’s been very obvious to us and our authors that as erotic romance has become popular, readers have gotten acclimated to it. And they’ve become jaded. Things that were shocking five years ago—anal sex, ménage à trois—have now become vanilla."
–Er, moving back to tamer topics, congrats to E-Reads on a nice PW write-up on such matters as its acquisition of Harlan Ellison titles, as well as writers’ share of e-book and POD profit shares.
—Ingram Digital says January-May sales of its digital textbooks surpassed 2007 figures by 400 percent plus. "Ingram Digital’s Education Solutions unit conducted the survey of a sample of its user base, which exceeds 24,000 students and educators. Data from the survey’s 680 respondents revealed that when deciding whether to purchase a digital title, 47 percent believe that ‘cost in relation to print copies’ is very important. A similar proportion of respondents identified the convenience of e-books (46 percent) and interactive features (45 percent) as also being very important." (Via GalleyCat.)
–And speaking of Ingram Digital, it will distribute 27 titles (92 volumes) from Encyclopedia Britannica via the MyiLibrary platform.
