The January 31 issue of Publishers Weekly had an interesting news article on “the explosive growth of digital sales.” Currently, about 8% of book sales are for e-books. That’s up from 3% just one year ago. Current projections are for e-books to represent 50% of sales by 2014. Most interesting to me, though, was the market share for the top five e-readers. From May 2010 to September 2010, Amazon’s market share leaped from 31% to 39%. The growth of its closest competitor, Apple (in its various forms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), saw only modest growth, and all of it for the iPad, which grew from 3% to 5% market share.

Not surprisingly, Kindle remains the favorite e-bookstore, with more than 60% of e-fans giving Amazon the nod. Barnes & Noble was the favorite for 24% of e-fans, with Apple at just 8%.

These results confirm what I’ve been seeing in sales for my two e-books (see my profile if you’re interested). Kindle sales far outstrip sales through Barnes & Noble and Apple. I’ll be curious to see how Sony Reader fits into the picture. One of my books, Skeleton, just went live there.

http://tinyurl.com/4rc9qbf