Ebook or Pbook?

[Justin Nemo]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

Please keep in mind that Mobile Read is not the whole world. Most of us have legion relatives who still prefer paper to electronics.

Heck, I give my book out for free and I've still had people tell me they'd prefer to pay for a paper copy than read the free e-Book version. So it's very, very difficult to generalize from Mobile Read to the rest of the world.

I would love to see e-Books dominate the market over p-Books since it's my format of choice, but we really are just guessing. Wildly.

Where did I mention that I did think it was the whole world? There seems to be more actual readers commenting in the General Forum, which is to be expected and why I mentioned it here.

I am not trying to draw any conclusions or formulate an opinion from replies to the post. I already have my opinion. I believe that ebooks will be dominant in less than five years, but that's all it is, an opinion.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

I believe that ebooks will be dominant in less than five years, but that's all it is, an opinion.

That is bold! Any particular country, or world-wide? At least we'll find out if you're wrong a lot sooner than we'll find out if I'm wrong.

(Well, unless you're right, in which case we'll find out at the same time!)

It's certainly an interesting time for the book trade.

[Justin Nemo]

At the risk of upsetting the Philippines again I won't say world wide, but certainly in the UK and US. If you take a look at Amazon's quarterly sales figures the facts are all there. I'm sure that Sony et al are having the same sales boom.

The savings they will make in printing and packaging alone will probably be enough to make the producers move faster towards the ereader. But as you said earlier, we're talking about the future, so it's all speculation.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by VydorScope

Didn't Amazon recently announce that e-books were out selling paper books in their store... or was I dreaming that?

No dream ... but once again you are looking at a skewed statistic. I found this NYTimes link, which adds: "But people should not exile their bookshelves to storage quite yet, many analysts warned. Over all, e-books account for only about 14 percent of all general consumer fiction and nonfiction books sold, according to Forrester Research."

I am not certain exactly what the basis of those figures are, but it does demonstrate how figures for online sales can skew things. A great many people do still buy books from bookshops.