Random House seeing increased ebook sales; may go to 10% of sales next year; not sure about agency model

From a Reuters article:

Bertelsmann’s Random House, the world’s biggest book publisher, expects electronic books to contribute more than 10 percent of its U.S. revenue next year, its head was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Chief Executive Markus Dohle told German magazine Der Spiegel that e-book revenue had already jumped to 8 percent in the United States and had turned into a new growth driver for the publisher of Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stieg Larsson. “We’re at 8 percent in the United States currently, it rose by leaps and bounds,” Dohle told Der Spiegel. “I could well imagine that we get beyond 10 percent next year,” he said.

Random House has not joined the agency model and this is one of the reasons it has not offered its books on the Apple iBookstore – which would require the publisher to set the end-user price.

“We’ve got to think very hard about whether we want this drastic change in our business model,” he said. “The question is if publishers know how to find the right retail price… This hasn’t been our job in the past.”

“One hundred days in the iBook store won’t decide about success or failure,” he said. “We think we have to tread carefully to find a business model that is sustainable for the years to come.”