I'd take recent talk of a 'decline in paper book sales' with a very big pinch of salt. Book sales spiked, coincidentally, around 2007-08, however year-on-year s

I'd take recent talk of a 'decline in paper book sales' with a very big pinch of salt. Book sales spiked, coincidentally, around 2007-08, however year-on-year sales are still going up. Why the coincidental 2007-08 date for one of the biggest spikes in print publishing? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it had 500% pre-sale figures of Half-Blood Prince. Despite being a supporter of ebooks, owning a Kindle and reading a lot, I still take Amazon's announcement with a whole bag of salt, because even a fistfull isn't enough for the inaccuracy allowed in their statement. Firstly to all those not-in-the-know, ebooks have solely been cannibalizing the sales of mass market paperbacks, which is why most major publishers are pricing them around the same price point. Why? Because mass market books are no longer paying off the editorial costs, which is the biggest Publisher cost in producing a book as your typical book passes through the hands of 3 editors and often multiple proof readers and the hands of an actual copy editor. By January 2011 figures from the AAP, total book (hardcover, paperback, ebook, audio-books and audio-ebooks) were down 1.9% over January 2010. Adult Hardbacks fell 11.3%, paperback (note these are generally the paperback versions of books by known authors) fell by 19.7% and mass market paperbacks (IE new authors) fell 30.9%. Children's Hardbacks stayed the status quo at a fall of 1.9%. Children's paperbacks sell 17.7%. However, given eBook's 116% growth it likely helped skew the total book sale decline. Yet this isn't impressive yet as it attributes only 8.6% of total book sales. I'll be impressed when eBook sales hit what MP3 sales hit this year, which received little publicity - in that MP3 sales this year hit $5.7 billion. Physical sales hit $5.7 billion. IE MP3 has 50% sale share. It may be a sign of what's to come, but I expect another 5 years before eBook sales even hit the same as mass market paper backs, and that will only be through massive declines in MMPB sale figures. I'd say about 8 years for trade paperbacks (Stephen King and all your lovely crime novelists) to be matched. However, this isn't really going to be a huge game changer as the bigger the market gets the more important marketing becomes. This will mean, the same as it does today, that the vast majority of eBook sales will be coming from the same authors it is today, just in a bigger proportion.