There are a number of interesting news articles coming out about the rise of eBooks and how digital media is being used by book publishers to innovate and diversify.
The bookseller published an
article in September 2010 that started to suggest that e-book sales are beginning to cannibalise printed books, especially in the genre of romance and science fiction.
The Times published a story on 1st January 2011 analysing the growth of romance e-books. According to Nielsen BookScan data, in 2009, 2% of all traditional books sold were in the 'romance and sagas' category, compared with 14% f all e-books sold in 2009.
In the last week of December, Amazon said its Kindle machine was the best selling product in the retail website's history. Amazon is believed to have sold 8m in 2010, up from 2.4m in 2009. There have been 14m sales on iPads since it launched in early 2010.
US bookseller Barnes & Noble said digital books were outselling physical ones of it website, with the retailer selling nearly 1 million e-books on Christmas Day alone.
According to the
Bookseller, Random House Groups Uk's e-book sales increased 800% year-on-year in 2010. Random House also launched an innovative new book '
Mortal Kiss' with teen website Stardoll. In the US, the group believes they could achieve
10% of sales via eBooks in 2011.
And finally Daniel Winner's
blog analyses the market after attending a recent conference. He is taken with Pearson's diversification in to its on-line world 'Poptropica' and predicts a rich future for digital book publishing if the industry embraces the opportunity.