E-reader rumor, speculation

I was reading through some blog postings on mediabistro.com, and found that a lot of them (not surprisingly) are dedicated to rumors about the Apple Tablet. There’s speculation about what it will look like (probably pretty much like an iPhone), and rumors about Apple being in talks with McGraw-Hill, Harper Collins, and Hachette about content partnerships with Apple.

Interestingly, another blog discusses the sales of a particular title, Shivering Sands, by Warren Ellis. Ellis is a self-published author who makes his books available through print on demand and downloadable PDFs. So far, his book has sold 708 copies (as of 1/22/10), 44 of which were in electronic form. The post speculates that this is actually a pretty high percentage of e-book sales. That’s a pretty small percentage. The e-book version is less than half of the price of the print version.

This got me thinking about all the hype surrounding e-readers. Of course, many people love new technology, and it’s definitely interesting to speculate about the future of the book as everything becomes more digitized. But I thought about our discussion of publishers’ websites being geared toward the consumer, when only about 2% of publishers’ sales are direct to consumer. So what percentage of book sales are e-books? Amazon reported that on Christmas day, its e-book sales were higher than its print book sales. A lot of what I read denounced this as a marketing ploy, or a result of people wanting to buy new books for the Kindles they got as Christmas gifts. Amazon doesn’t really provide clear data on its e-book sales, mostly stats and figures without any hard numbers.

I would love to find some hard data on numbers of e-book sales. Maybe once Apple unveils its Tablet as a competitor to the Kindle we will be able to see something more concrete.