E-books are nearly a $1 billion business and should triple in size, Forrester said in a new forecast. The business should reach $966 million in e-books sold in 2010 alone and should triple to $3 billion in 2015. Book reading should be “forever altered” by that point, even if color e-paper and advancements to the books themselves don’t take place, analyst James McQuivey said.
While only seven percent of Internet-aware adults read e-books, but those who read digitally at all use it 41 percent of the time, moving up to 66 percent for those with a focused device. These readers are more likely to pay for books instead of borrowing them .
The shift to e-books was likely to have the same impact that digital music and movies have had, McQuivey explained. It would only be a matter of time before the “whole structure gets torn down” and traditional, physical bookstores are replaced with online stores.
