In their investor conference this morning B&N said that it is forecasting that the consumer book market will grow from $23 billion to $27 billion in 2013 with all the growth coming from ebooks. Publishers Weekly says that they forecast that “sales of ebooks will be $6 billion and that sales of print books will fall by $6 billion” in the same period.
PW gets the numbers wrong? Publishers Lunch tells me that Toshiba said that print falls $2 billion, ebooks add $6 billion for a net gain of $4 billion.
Indeed, the PW numbers seem to be a typo. The Associated Press numbers add up: $2 billion drop in print book sales, $6 billion increase in e-book sales, total of $4 billion sales increase from $23 billion to $27 billion.