e-books Rising

Picking up on my post from last week about the surging market for e-books: a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the publishing industry, covering the period from 2008-2010, was released yesterday, and among the many interesting conclusions found in it is the following, as reported by the New York Times:

E-books were another bright spot, thanks to the proliferation and declining cost of e-reading devices like the Nook by Barnes & Noble and Amazon’s Kindle, and the rush by publishers to digitize older books.

In 2008 e-books were 0.6 percent of the total trade market; in 2010, they were 6.4 percent. Publishers have seen especially robust e-book sales in genre fiction like romance, mystery and thrillers, as well as literary fiction. In 2010, 114 million e-books were sold, the report said.

The survey does not include statistics for 2011, which so far has been a boom year for e-books as prices for e-book readers have continued to come down.

The Times also reported that

Sales of trade books grew 5.8 percent to $13.9 billion, fueled partly by e-books…. Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction, grew 6.6 percent over three years.

As I predicted last week, I think the soaring interest in e-books is in the near future going to converge with the soaring interest in juvenile books, as more and more young readers and their parents partake in the easy accessibility of e-books and e-book readers.