The ebook market is growing faster as it grows larger.
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), in an email to members Friday, reported U.S. wholesale ebook sales for the month of January, 2010 rose 261 percent to $31.9 million from the same period a year ago.
To put this in perspective, I created the chart below, which pulls annual wholesale ebook sales data from the Association of American Publishers(AAP). For 2010, I annualized IDPF’s January data.
January 2010
This is interesting, but a 261% increase in January 2010 over January 2009 isn’t that exciting, since so many new readers were released in time for the holidays(and got a lot of press), and the international edition of the Kindle was only released in October of 2009, opening up a whole new market just in time for the holidays.
I don’t doubt the growth, but Jan 2010 could easily be a blip.
Maybe we should look closer
I appreciate the comments of the other reader, however I do have to say that the information I located regarding ebooks gives a clear indication that the market is indeed growing quickly and is set to grow even more in the future. For example, reading through this article posted last December by paidContent.org it is apparent that since last September there has been steady growth in this market; and while the technology is still new and subject to changes that will improve content and accessibility even more ebooks have immense power for reaching huge numbers of people. Additionally, I think it will drastically change the way people view libraries and we should be cautious with pushing this new technology to the side and not giving consideration as to how it will change the landscape of libraries. http://paidcontent.org/article/419-ten-predictions-for-the-e-book-market-in-2010/