e-Publishing Poised to Break Records (Again) in 2012

Date: 10.30.11

Author(s): Danny O. Snow

e-Publishing Poised to Break Records (Again) in 2012
Special to the Society for New Communications Research
by Danny O. Snow, All Rights Reserved

[Palo Alto, Calif. — October 2011] As tablet computer and smartphone sales soar in the US during the upcoming 2011 holiday season, there are strong indications that e-Book sales in early 2012 could take e-publishing to “the next level,” totaling as much as $100 million per month.

Accelerated by the anticipated November 15 launch of Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire tablet, and the continued boom in sales of the iPad2, the momentum of e-Books could redouble next year as millions of consumers who get tablets and smartphones as holiday gifts are hungry for reading material to download in 2012.

A year ago, a downloading frenzy followed the holiday season. According to Publishers Lunch, “February [2011] ebook sales totaled $90.3 million, significantly ahead of the record $69.9 million reported the previous month.” Total e-Book sales of $160 million in just two months broke all previous records. But this year’s holiday sales of e-reading devices could dwarf the previous spike by a wide margin in early 2012.

As reported on 1/28/11 by Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times, “In 2010, e-Book sales rose by around 400% and pulled in almost $1 billion in sales.” After the 2011-2012 holiday season, e-Books sales could surpass all previous records.

For skeptics, let’s crunch some numbers.

In reports from the International Business Times that were released prior to Amazon’s announcement on September 28 that it would launch an iPad-like tablet for the holidays,
there were already 17 million Kindle devices in use.

More recently, rumors are circulating that pre-orders of Kindle Fire tablets are running upward of 20,000 units per day. (Some range as high as 50,000 to 90,000 daily.) Using a conservative estimate of 25,000 orders per day, perhaps 2-5 million Kindle Fire devices would ship within 90 days of the November 15 rollout. This would translate to 20+ million Kindles on the street in early 2012.

On the iPad side, the “Cult of Mac” Web site estimated about 28 million units in use as of July 2011. With brisk holiday sales, in spite of the challenge from Amazon, the iPad user base could easily exceed 50 million by year’s end.

Over 70 million tablet users sounds impressive… but this estimate is dwarfed by sales of smartphones like the iPhone, Google’s Android and the Blackberry — all e-Book capable — with more than double the number of tablet users, and growing more rapidly.

Google’s recent acquisition of Motorola to become a smartphone manufacturer in its own right, and growing use of its Android operating system on more and more phones and tablet devices, make it a serious rival to both Apple and Amazon in the e-Book world.

In spite of the media hoopla over tablets in 2011, some industry observers continue to believe that pocket-sized devices that function as telephones as well as Web, e-mail and e-Book reading devices, will ultimately prevail in the marketplace.

Whether tablet or smartphone; whether Apple, Amazon or Google; in late 2011 it appears nearly certain that authors and publishers who have quality content available for
downloading by year’s end will be well positioned to capitalize on explosive growth early in 2012.

Whether Amazon, Apple or Google will dominate e-publishing in the years ahead remains an open question. But it’s clear that a titanic struggle between these giants is taking shape. Stay tuned to SNCR for an upcoming “e-Publishing Year 2011 in Review” report in early 2012.

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About the Writer:
Harvard graduate Danny O. Snow is a senior research fellow of The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR.org), a Palo Alto based think tank dedicated to the advanced study of new and emerging media. He founded Unlimited Publishing LLC, “The Professional POD Book Publisher™,” in 2000. Snow also works as a consultant to fellow authors and publishers, as a journalist, and as an industry commentator. He is widely quoted by print, broadcast and online media about new publishing and communication technologies. In 2009, he was elected to the board of directors of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA-online.org), serving thousands of publishing firms across North America and around the world since 1983. More recently, he has been an occasional columnist for Publishers Weekly, and struggling to keep pace with a book world that changes every 15 minutes.

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