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E-Books Are Only 6% of Printed Book Sales
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's technology blog argues that e-book sales represent 'only six pecent of the total market for new books.' It cites a business analysis which calculates that by mid-July, Amazon had sold 15.6 million hardcover books versus 22 million e-books, but with sales of about 48 million more paperback books. Amazon recently announced they sell 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, but when paperbacks are counted, e-books represent just 29.3% of all Amazon's book sales. And while Amazon holds about 19% of the book market, they currently represent 90% of all e-book sales — suggesting that e-books represent a tiny fraction of all print books sold. 'Many tech pundit wants books to die,' argues MIT's Christopher Mims, citing the head of Microsoft's ClearType team, who says 'I'd be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I'd rather have them all on an iPad.' But while Nicholas Negroponte predicts the death of the book within five years, Mims argues that 'it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of e-books will slow.'"
I'm a person, and I'm willing to do that.
What is far, far more likely is each ebook will be purchased once, the DRM stripped and the resulting file posted in five or six different formats for the planet to freely download.
Publishers will continue because the non-Internet-savvy population will still be out there buying books, just like they are still buying CDs at Walmart. As these people age out of the population (i.e., die) less and less revenue will come in to publishers. It will be viewed as a non-profit activity publising (or writing) a book.
But we will have 500 years of back catalog to continue downloading from pirate sites pretty much forever.