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O’Reilly report ebooks 88% of sales

O’Reilly have been running a series of posts lately on their blog about the state of the computer book market, and yesterday they wrapped up the series with some sales figures. Yep, 88% of unit sales came from ebooks in 2010, and 79% of income ($).

The rest of the series is worth reading, and you can find it here.

So 88% of sales are coming from ebooks, but I’m going to add a caveat. That 88% is only for sales through O’Reilly.com, their website. It doesn’t include retail partners like college bookstores, B&N, and others.

I’m not surprised the website is showing such a larger chunk of ebook sales. Part of the reason you visit their site is to get the book as fast as possible, and getting an ebook in a minute will always trump getting a paper book in a couple days.

And in other news, they’re also reporting that PDF use is declining. Four years ago it was PDF or paper, and now that O’Reilly offer Epub, Mobi,  and other formats everyone has largely stopped using PDF.

via O’Reilly

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Comments


monopole February 24, 2011 um 1:11 pm

This is certainly the case for me. O’Reilly really gets it with respect to e-books, good dead-tree/ebook combo deals, cheap upgrades of registered dead-tree books to ebooks, no DRM and unlimited downloads.

Over the past year I have been immersed in a 14 hour a day project conducted in a facility with near non-existent net-access. The nearby bookstores have an atrocious selection of CS books, and often overnight isn’t fast enough. A quick purchase and download during lunch at a wifi equipped saved my bacon on a regular basis. I now have a considerable reference library on my 9rooted) Nook Color which is far more convenient than lugging a shelf of books to field sites.


Darrell August 31, 2011 um 2:18 pm

But how does one markup an ePub or Mobi document? PDF annotation tools abound.


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