eBook Market Needs Transparency, and Fast
By Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Chief Executive Optimist, Digital Book World, June 9, 2010

    “Five of the six biggest publishers in the US, who have their books on the iBookstore tell us that the share of eBooks now that are going through the iBookstore, is about 22%.
    So iBooks market share now, of ebooks from 5 of these 6 major publishers, is up to 22% in just about eight weeks.”

From consumer demand, to devices and DRM schemes, to piracy concerns and reliable sales data, the nascent but undeniably booming eBook market is becoming a smoke and mirrored mess for anyone looking for straight answers.

During Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2010 on Monday, Steve Jobs added the latest puff of smoke with his carefully worded statement on iBooks’ eBook market share that many media outlets took out of context, paying more attention to his visuals than his words, gleefully “reporting” that Apple, in only two months, had miraculously cornered more than 1/5th of the market with their relatively minuscule selection of eBooks from only a handful-plus of publishers.

One of the most glaring instances is the sensationalistic Motley Fool article, Apple Will Eat Amazon Alive, in which they engage in the kind of “analysis” that enabled little things like Enron and the sub-prime mortgage crisis:
    That’s good enough for a 22% slice of the e-book market, according to Apple’s publishers.

    Now, before we begin shrugging our shoulders at a 22% sliver of the nascent digital book market, or musing on how many of those 5 million books were public domain freebies, let’s consider how remarkable an accomplishment this actually is…
    If you’re Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) or Sony (NYSE: SNE), throwing in the digital towel doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea at this point.

Read more here.