From the press release:
E-book sales from participating reporting publishers continue to grow, with a 112.4 percent increase over October 2009 ($40.7 million) compared to $19.2 million in October 2009. January-October 2010 year-to-date E-book sales are up 171.3 percent reaching $345.3 million compared to 127.3 million from January-October 2009.
Downloaded Audio Books also saw an increase of 20.7 percent over last year, with sales of $6.3 million this October; and the category was also up 38.6 percent year-to-date. Physical Audio Book sales decreased 20.5 percent in October with sales totaling $14.7 million; sales for the year to date are down 13.5 percent.
According to James McQuivey of Forrester Research ‘2010 will end with $966 million in e-books sold to consumers’. Can somebody please explain to me how we will get there from the present $345.3 million year-to-date?
Since the Forrester numbers are a guess, it’s hard to tell where he pulled all the numbers from.
The AAP numbers don’t include all publishers. Maybe he’s factoring in probable sales from the smaller indie e-publishers.
I just saw an article in the trade press where some expert said that Christmas Day may break records on ebook downloads since ebook readers seem to be one of “the” gifts this year. It would have to be a server crashing day, indeed, to bring up the current numbers to Forrester levels.
@Gous
AAP is US sales only
Forrester may be predicting worldwide numbers
While the AAP numbers are intesting they really don’t provide a realistic picture of eBook popularity. In addition to missing some of the major publishers the AAP numbers are also missing most of the eBook only publishers and no self-publishers report to the AAP. Also the AAP number skew toward the educational/academic and away from SF/Fantasy/Romance, which is very bad if your going to show what is go ing on in the eBook market. They are also only showing domestic net sales dollars to publishers, these are sales figures by publishers, not retail, not units sold or gross dollars. So interesting, but not very useful.
I agree with Marilynn’s answer; the number of ‘small’ ePublishers has increased exponentially over the last four years, many of them going beyond merely publishing their own material and posting the work of other little-known writers. Until a comprehensive survey/study/census of said publishers is taken, then the actual numbers of eBook sales are anyone’s guess.
Maybe I’m missing a financial term here, but these numbers look anything but steady. Perhaps the increase in ebook sales holds steady, but I don’t think the AAP is saying what they mean.
I don’t like to argue semantics, but the title is what drew me in! I was figuring on a stabilization of the market.
Nicely laid out numbers are meaningless without context and credibility. I believe these have neither.