Critical Mass

Waterstone’s have announced that they have sold 30,000 Sony eReaders in the UK. Sony claim 300,000 have been sold worldwide of which I guess most have been sold in technology mad Japan and South Korea. Taken with reports of large sales of the Amazon Kindle there are clearly lots more people with eReaders than I would have believed.

I have to say I am quite astounded and will really have to rethink my view of the future of ebooks. Until now I have been an ebook sceptic. I’ve been in publishing long enough to have seen two or three digital revolutions that ‘were going to be the death of books’. All of these claims have to date been unfounded. I am sure that this new ebook revolution won’t mean the death of books but I am starting to seriously think that there may be a sustainable market for consumer ebooks.

Until now I believed that consumer ebooks wouldn’t really take off without the presence of a critical mass of devices out in the wider market place and I wasn’t convinced that the critical mass would ever develop. I am not sure that 30,000 is that critical mass but it must be getting close. 250,000 Kindles in the USA must be close to a critical mass for that market.

If only the two devices didn’t use different file formats publishers would have 500,000 devices to make ebooks for, instead of having to make two file formats. Given that Amazon have lead the way in the commercial sale of DRM free music which has forced Apple to sell DRM free music on iTunes, it will be interesting to see if Amazon persist in using a proprietary DRM system for the Kindle.

With any luck the Kindle 2 is being delayed so that they can convert it to take epub formats. Given this and a European launch of the Kindle and I’ll have to looking at ebook production myself and that will be a change.