Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the 19th century.
– Nothing Like It in the World

According to Forrester’s five-year forecast for eBooks in the U.S., 2010 will end with a total of $966 million in eBook sales. It’s expected to triple, with $3 billion in sales by 2015. At that point the industry will be forever altered, says the study’s author.

Today, just 7% of online adults who read books read e-books. But that 7% read the most books and spend the most money on books. The average e-book reader already consumes 41% of books in digital form, and that includes the people who don’t have an e-reader yet, which is nearly half of them. For those that have a Kindle or other e-reader, they read 66% of their books digitally.

Forester predicts e-book readers will quickly shift a majority of their book reading to a digital form. Nearly $3 billion in e-book sales by 2015 is predicted, even if nothing else changes in the industry. Meaning even if we never get color e-Ink screens, if publishers never experiment with e-book subscriptions, and interactive e-book formats never succeed, we will still see digital get close to $3 billion in size by the middle of the decade.

Publishers need to make ebooks the new default for publishing, says McQuivey.

The e-book market is the fastest-growing segment of the bookselling industry. Goldman Sachs forecast in April that sales of e-books in the U.S. would rise by 47 percent each year sequentially until 2015. They forecast $3.2 billion in e-Book sales by 2015.

• Goldman forecasts Apple’s e-book market share to explode to a third of all e-books sold in 2015. Currently they have 10 percent of the market.
• Amazon’s has half the market share presently. Goldman expects Amazon sales to fall to 28 percent by 2015.
• Currently Barnes & Noble has just 5 percent market share. Goldman expects this to grow to 15 percent of e-book sales by 2010.

Amazon says magazine and newspaper publishers can earn 70-percent royalty beginning on December 1, 2010, on each title they sell in the Kindle Store. Amazon also introduced a self-service publishing tool for magazines and newspapers, similar to its Digital Text tool for books.

If the delivery cost of a newspaper that delivers 9MB/month is $1.35, and the publication costs $9.99/month, then a publisher would earn $6.05 for each subscription. Color could deliver more ad revenue — ideally another $4/mo or so.

Do the math. Multiply $10/mo by 10,000…or 1 million.

Chinese company Hanvon is expected to unveil the first tablet with a color E Ink on Tuesday at the FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo, the New York Times has reported. “Color is absolutely critical for E Ink,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Without it, they’ll either be replaced by LCD displays or other competitors.”

Last month, Barnes and Noble announced the $249 the Nook color, but the 7-inch screen uses LCD technology. LCD’s use more juice and aren’t good outdoors, but they CAN play video.

According to the Association of American Publishers, eBook sales have increased by 193% over the previous year and sales are continuing to surge.

“By expanding its offering to include a tablet reader with broader publishing distribution opportunities, Barnes & Noble may have elevated itself to the head of the class,” Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner, wrote on his corporate blog. “I would say that Apple’s iPad suffers a blow as a digital publishing distributor competing head-to-head with a tablet reading device from a major bookseller.”

Analysts believe Amazon has sold between 3 million and 6 million units since the first Kindle was introduced in 2007. David Carnoy explains How to self-publish an e-book.

Analysts estimate that consumers will buy 19.5 million tablets in 2010. The number should reach 150 million by 2013. There are expected to be 80 million broadband wireless subscribers in the United States at the end of 2010, with 98 million expected by 2014, with a penetration rate of more than 30%, says MarketResearch.com.

For the current calendar year (ending in September), iSuppli estimated from 12.9 to 13.8 million iPads were shipped. iSuppli bumped its forecast for 2011 iPad sales to 43.7 million units, up from 36.5 million.

At least one analyst predicts Apple will ship between 45 and 48 million iPads in 2011.

At the end of 2010, more than 12 million iPads will be sold, with 40+ million in 2011 and 60+ million in 2012. That’s 100+ million by the end of 2012.

iSuppli predicts the iPad will account for about 62 percent of tablet sales in 2012. The invasion of Android tablets has yet to begin. Android was on 44% of U.S. smartphones in the 3rd quarter of 2010, according to figures from NPD.

Google’s vision may be more web-centric (using Chrome browser) rather than app-centric (using Android Market), due to Google’s dominating ad position. Scaling content from 4″ to 40″ screens is the tricky bit.

Forrester claims tablets will surpass netbook sales by 2012.

Informa says world-wide mobile ad revenue will reach $3.5 billion this year. By 2015, revenue will have increased eight-fold to around $24 billion, thanks largely to Apple and Google, says Informa.

In-app ads are expected to reach $8 billion by 2015, according to Borrell Associates. Fifteen percent of the $8 billion business, or $1.2 billion, will come from local advertising.

The Atlantic Goes Inside the Google Books Algorithm. The 15 million books Google has scanned and the truly unprecedented nature of Google Books — and the Google Books Settlement — is unique.

“We’re in the middle of doing something radical. No one has ever pulled together this whole collection, scanning books from 40 different libraries,” said James Crawford, the team’s engineering director.

Tablet publishing has arrived. For traditional publishers it’s a digital bomb that cannot be defused. For nearly everyone else, it could represent nothing less than a new age.

Related e-book articles on Dailywireless include; NOOKColor: $249, PBS on iPad, Borders – GET PUBLISHED, Mixx: Demographic of One, iWork Does ePub, iPad Publishing Model: It’s People!, iPad Subscription Model Rejected?, Behavioral Advertising, Google Tablet Rumors, Samsung Tablet, U-Verse Mobile – See It Now, TV Metrics Worth Watching, Here Come the Tablets, 2010: 11 Million Tablets, Google: King of all Media?, WiFi Nook: $149, Free Download for iOS 4 Ready , Starbucks: Free WiFi + Free Content, Scribd Does HTML 5 Magazines, Kindle Announces 70% Royalty Option, Media’s Primordial Soup: Tablets, Scribd Does HTML 5 Magazines, Tablets, Tablets, Tablets, E-Magazines: Pay Once, Play Anywhere, The $99 Android Tablet, Barnes & Noble: Self Publishing this Summer, Apple Sells 1M iPads, Google Editions: World’s Largest Virtual Bookstore?, Google Tablet for Verizon?, Android Outsells Apple, Flash Support in Android 2.2, Battle of the eBooks, Dell Android Tablet for AT&T/T-Mobile?, Google Tablet: Android or What?, and Tablet Revolution!

Posted by Sam Churchill on Monday, November 8th, 2010 at 11:02 am.