Friday, June 04, 2010


Sales of ebooks will overtake print books within the next five years, Sony has predicted.

By Shane Richmond, Head of Technology (Editorial)
Published, The Daily Telegraph, 02 Jun 2010


 Sony says that ebook sales will overtake print sales within five years.  Photo: Getty

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division, said: "Within five years there will be more digital content sold than physical content. Three years ago, I said within ten years but I realised that was wrong - it's within five."

He said the same patterns that Sony had seen in the digitisation of music and photography were now being repeated in the books market.

Sony announced today that it will sponsor a new category in this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize - the Sony Reader Award for Unpublished Writers. The prize, to be awarded in December, will go to the best book by an unpublished novelist under 30 years old.

Omar Gurnah, Reader category marketing manager for Sony, said: “Being involved in the Dylan Thomas Prize this year is an ideal partnership for Reader. We wanted to take the Dylan Thomas Prize’s ethos of working with young authors a step further by creating a new category to offer Britain’s unpublished writers a unique platform on which to showcase their novel-writing talents.”

Sony believes that the ebook market has now passed the point of no return. Haber said: "I have multiple meetings with publishers and tell them paradigm shifts happen. You can say fortunately or unfortunately you haven't had a paradigm shift in, what, hundreds of years."

He added: "We in the consumer electronics area have a paradigm shift every year or two."
Full story at The Telegraph.

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