R. Scot Johns's Blog, page 25

Happy Birthday (Project) Gutenberg

In 1971 Michael S. Hart started Project Gutenberg by typing in a paperback copy of the Declaration of Independence to create the first electronic book. Using a Xerox Sigma V computer at the University of Illinois - which was then one of only 15 nodes on the network that would become the Internet - Hart's intention was to make available the most sought after reference materials, the initial goal being 10,000 titles by the end of the century. It would take 16 years to create the first 313 titles, all hand-typed into digital text files.





Growth of Project Gutenberg publications from 1994 until 2008
 Today, PG hosts over 34,000 titles in dozens of languages and multiple formats, including ePub and Kindle as well as the original text and html files (plus a number of others such as PDFs and Plucker). All titles are free public domain works, making Project Gutenberg one of the largest book repositories in the world, a virtual no-return library. The vast majority of free content available on modern e-reading devices is drawn from Project Gutenberg's archive, which now contains nearly every classic works of literature, and a great many obscure and long out of print editions that otherwise might have disappeared.



The Project Gutenberg CD/DVD Project now also allows you to download iso files for CD/DVD burning that contain collections of the most popular titles, and PG will even send you one for free. The project is still operated as a non-profit, but you can


Project Gutenberg's stated objective is "to break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy" by encouraging the creation and distribution of ebooks "in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible."



So happy birthday to Project Gutenberg, and to the ebook, which both turn 40 this year!

2010 Book Industry Sales

Hot on the heels of this morning's news that Borders has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a report from the Association of American Publishers detailing the final sales figures for 2010. As expected, ebook sales smoked everything. While Borders reported an overall loss of $168 million for 2010, industry wide ebook sales jumped 164% to $441.3 million (up from $166.9 last year) - very little of which was earned by Borders, who will now close its largest 200 stores (out of the 642 still operating) in order to liquidate enough inventory to keep the others running. But with $1.29 billion in liabilities and a total of only $1.27 billion in assets, it's unlikely any suppliers will willingly throw away more inventory: each of the five largest publishers are owed double-digit millions for inventory already sold ($44.1 million to Penguin alone), and have stopped shipments to Borders weeks ago.

U.S. Book Sales Statistics compiled by the Association of American Publishers
Sales of physical editions fell in every segment of the market, with Adult Hardbacks down 5.1%, Adult Paperbacks losing two percent, and Mass Market titles dropping 6.3 percent. In the Children's and Young Adult book sector, Paperbacks lost 5.7 percent and hardbacks dropped 9.5%. Meanwhile, digital sales are experiencing unprecedented growth. Among audio titles, downloaded digital audio books climbed 38.8 percent while physical audio books lost 6.3%.



The AAP's official figures put ebook sales at 8.32 percent of the domestic trade book market, up from 3.2 percent in 2009. As you can see from the chart above (released as part of this morning's press report), sales of printed books have now declined for three years running, while ebooks gained significant ground during the same period, and have done so consistently since the AAP began tracking digital sales in 2002.



And that's a trend that's not likely to change anytime soon.



With the single exception of a large jump in 2005, print book sales have remained essentially stagnant for over a decade now. And with the cost of print editions climbing as sales fall (a self-perpetuating cycle), and retail outlets being eliminated right and left at an alarming rate, digital editions will only continue to claim more and more of the overall book market.

Kindle Public Notes

If you happen to be reading (or plan to read) The Saga of Beowulf, you can now add your own shared notes inside the book, and I will see them. I will try to answer any relevant comments or questions you might post by responding with a shared note of my own, right inside the book. If you have a Facebook page, then friend me and I'll also see your notes posted there as soon as they are shared.



Optionally, you can go to The Saga of Beowulf  book page on the Kindle site and view all public notes and highlights there. The book will also be listed under "Your Books" on your own page on the Kindle site, which you can access using your Amazon account to sign in.



The only drawback to this system is that Public Notes are limited to 100 characters, which is about two short sentences or a single moderately longish one (roughly two lines on your Kindle screen). This doesn't allow much room for in depth commentary, but can serve to initiate a conversation via Facebook, etc. Basically it's like Twitter on the Kindle (in fact, you can also link your notes to Twitter, but I haven't bothered with a Twitter account just yet).



As a side note, the Kindle edition of The Saga of Beowulf has now been upgraded to include actual page numbers, so you can see where you are relative to the 600-page print edition. You may have to delete your current version of the book and reload the upgraded one from your archive folder, but this doesn't cost you anything. The page numbers are accurate with respect to the 6x9 softcover.

Kindle Version 3.1

The latest software upgrade for the Kindle 3 ereader is now available in an "Early Preview Release" for anyone wanting to install it manually before its general rollout on March 11, which will occur automatically via WiFi for owners of the latest generation device. The upgrade incorporates four improvements, at least two of which are fairly significant.



The first - and most requested - of these is the inclusion of actual page numbers corresponding to the physical print edition of a title. The main reason for this is to accommodate academic references and sharing of notes between readers using different formats (as, for example, members of a reading group). Kindle locations are fine for gauging your progress through a work, but help little when discussing a work with someone reading the print edition (or another reader format) of that book. However, at present this upgrade is a work in progress, since Amazon now has to re-scan and/or reformat all of its digital files to incorporate this feature. Consequently, only a handful of the top selling ebooks have actual page numbers at the moment. Eventually, however, this will become a standard feature.



To see if an ebook you own or plan to purchase features actual page numbers, look in the Product Details section of that title's Amazon page, where you will find (or not) a new reference to the print edition from which the page numbers are taken. This is important because (contrary to popular belief apparently) page numbering in print book editions often varies depending on format (page size, hardback versus paperback, edition number, country of origin, etc). A U.K. hardcover is not the same as a U.S. paperback, for example.



Secondly, and to my mind more important (at least potentially), is the addition of Public Notes, which allows readers to share comments at any point in a book with other readers - and, thereby, with the book's author. Highlights have been public for some time, which is particularly useful for academic texts, but of little real use in works of fiction. Public Notes, however, offer a reader the opportunity to make detailed and very specific comments on various elements of a story - as, for example, word choice and phrasing, plot points, questions and ambiguities, textual or story errors, pacing problems or recommendations, and personal responses either negative or positive - all of which are inherently useful and potentially insightful both for other readers as well as for the author in evaluating reactions to the work.



How much this will be used is yet to be seen, but I am hopeful it will provide an added opportunity for increasing communication between author and reader (a gap that digital innovation is quickly narrowing). Within the book you can only view comments of people you "follow" (which appear as an @ link at the note's insertion point), but all Public Notes are available for reading on the book's page at kindle.amazon.com, where you can also search and discover other readers (and authors) to follow. Every Kindle user has their own page where their books, notes, highlights and settings can be accessed.



A third, somewhat related update is the additional of a new "Before You Go" rating feature, which presents readers with the option to rate and comment on a work they have just completed. You now have the option to "Save" or "Save & Share," the latter of which posts your rating to your Kindle page as well as any social network sites you've authorized. In addition, you will now apparently get customized recommendations for other titles to read (though none are shown in the preview image), much as you do on many other Amazon pages, which you can, of course, click to view and purchase right from your Kindle. Personally, I'm not impressed with the rating/recommendation feature thus far, as three tries to rate and comment on a book I finished this morning resulted in a frozen screen each time, and when finally successful, I got no recommendations, leaving much to be desired.



The final upgrade is to the magazine layout feature, which is supposed to make it easier to navigate periodicals by article. But since I don't waste my time downloading magazines I won't ever use this. Periodicals to me are pointless, as by the time of publication its contents are generally old news I've already read online days or even weeks before. This may change with digital publication, but I still don't really care to get my news and analysis that way. That's what blogs are for.

Poser-Photoshop Test Art, Part 2

This is another test piece I did recently as an experiment in various ways of combining blending layers in Photoshop. As with most things in Photoshop (or Poser, for that matter), the setting variations are virtually endless, so it really ends up being a matter of personal preference much of the time. But in order to decide what those preferences are, you first need to know what options there are to choose from.

I began by reusing elements from the "Poetic Ending" scene I did a while back (the blog post for which I did on it you can view here), since I had them handy as a completed scene that I was never fully satisfied with. Although I love Poser's ability to render stunning detail, it often ends up looking, well... digital... kind of cold and sterile, with no real style or personality. I wanted to achieve something a little more "artsy" in appearance.



An additional difficulty was that from the beginning I had intended to incorporate the associated text from the book into the composition, which in the original version proved problematic at best. The scene is intentionally dark, and while I concentrated the focal point of the scene elements on the left, the only way to insert text over the right half was as light-on-dark type or via a lighter text box, either of which destroyed the shadowy aesthetic altogether. So the dilemma became how to artistically create a dark scene with a light background. And the only way to do that is to imply more darkness in the lighting than actually exists in the image. In essence, I was trying to create a piece of art with two focal points: the character and the text, without either overpowering the other. This has been an ongoing battle for some time now as I've been previsualizing art layouts for The Ring Saga, and thoroughly more difficult than I ever imagined - an endless conflict between light and dark, as it were.

Consequently, this time around I decided to build the scene from the background up, rather than the other way around, from the character in, so to speak. And although I already had all the elements for the scene pre-rendered, in the end I re-did them all from alternate perspectives for the sake of the new composition (I absolutely loathe Photoshop's meagre 3D capabilities, by the way, which I find utterly unhelpful for all but basic layout purposes, paling by comparison to Poser's powerful render engine, nor with the intuitive elegance of Poser's interface).



This is the basic background plate I made, this time using Poser's full-on frontal cam for the render. I retained the lighting I had created for the original scene, consisting of something like eight or nine lights to cast a shadowy candle glow onto the walls and light the windows slightly from behind. In Photoshop I positioned two of these side by side in a two-up 6x9 page layout format, including guides for quarter inch margins with an additional quarter inch press overrun around the outer edges. Normally this would be a half inch margin for standard text books, but as the art runs edge-to-edge, a half inch margin is unnecessary. The center margin will be duplicated on either side when split for print, so as to create a more seamless transition across the page divide.



To create the painted parchment effect for the background I inserted an underlying layer of an aged paper scanned at a high resolution and set the wall layers to "Difference," and then copying them to multiply the result. I then used the burn and dodge tools to lighten and darken the resulting image to my liking. In addition, I created feathered boxed for the text areas using Adjustment Layer Masks to increase the brightness behind the overlaid text. I essentially did the same for the floor element, using Pin Light for the blending style and gradient masks to create a dark-to-light shading, while also exaggerating the perspective lines in order to create a greater sense of depth and draw the viewer's eye in.



To create the "hellfire" burning beneath the floor effect I copied the floor layer and changed the blend setting to Soft Light, filtering it using "Ink Outlines" on the Brush Stokes tab, which gives it a hot red glow that blends with the floor texture, creating fine detailed lines over color washes. I also added a (not-so) subtle alchemy symbol using the Linear Dodge (Add) blend style to burn it into the floor, as well as some slightly more subtle symbols laid over the walls (both at 35% opacity) using Soft Light blending, which I then partially erased. My artistic license here is based on the inherent conflict between the pagan Beowulf subject matter and the Christian monk(s) who penned it, mixed with the historical fact that the first Beowulf scribe died before the book was done (for more on the theories behind the Beowulf scribe's demise see the previous post I linked to above, or the Author's Notes section for The Saga of Beowulf on the Fantasy Castle Books website).



The next element I brought in was the Dead Monk and Lectern, which was rendered all together originally as one piece, but re-rendered in several layers here for artistic reasons which I'll get to in a minute. For one thing, I decided to use the full body of the monk rather than just the upper torso, which is all I had before, so I had to re-pose the lower half and recalculate the dynamic cloth of the monk's robe in Poser. The need for this became obvious with the background all laid out, as there was now much more space and distance in the scene than before, so that a close-up of the monk was no longer possible. And while I lost some nice gruesome facial detail, I gained a better look and balance overall.



The technique used for "painting in" all the props was essentially the same throughout, although I employed different settings and sorting orders for the four to eight layers of each one in order both to try out differences and to match the background style and lighting, as well as creating an overall artistic feel.



The steps are basically these:



1. Render each prop separately with the same lighting as the background plate, and in its final perspective. To do this I imported the background comp into Poser and positioned my remaining props to match.



2. Import the base render layer into Photoshop, scaling and positioning it into its final form.



3. Duplicate the layer and change its blending style to Linear Dodge (Add). This lightens it up and brings out the highlights. Here, of course, I'm starting with a very dark render, so if you render with a fairly bright lighting set you'll have to create a darken layer to offset this (or change your lighting).



4. Duplicate the base render layer again and filter it with the "Ink Outlines" style under Brush Strokes. Here you have a wide range of settings to choose from, depending on the style you're after. In most cases I used a very short stroke to keep the details, such as on the chest and lectern in the foreground, while lengthening it on others, most noticeably on the Vitrine and its contents at the center, which I needed to blend into the back wall more than any other prop. I also cranked the light setting up while keeping the darks fairly low, if not all the way down at 1. However, I erased the center glass portion of this layer to make the shelves contents more visible.



5. Duplicate still one more layer of the base render, this time using the "Find Edges" filter under the Stylize options. This results in a blueprint-looking line drawing which I desaturate to gray, although you don't really have to. Set this layer to "Darken" or "Darker Color" depending on your preference for the layer content. This creates a slight ink or pencil drawing effect, which you can lessen by lowering the opacity, although in some instances I duplicated this layer to strengthen the effect.



Generally this is the layer order I employed, but changing the order alters the resulting effect, since each blending style acts upon the layers beneath it. In addition, further layers were added on some elements:



For the high-backed Medieval chair (to the right of the Vitrine), I added a Soft Light layer to further wash out the color and create a subtle watercolor wash effect to its woodgrain texture, while heavily darkening its outline by doubling up the Find Edges layer. I did this for the Vitrine as well, but added a gradiated layer mask to make the top more abstract and the bottom more detailed, which helped to blend it with both the wall and floor. Initially I made it dark on the bottom and light on the top, but it actually looked and blended better by using a contrasting gradiation. That's just one of the many reasons to always experiment and try new ideas.



For the dead monk (but not the lectern) I pulled back the Ink Outlines layer, but added both Sumi-e and crosshatch layers, each at low opacity, and each of which were painted in only where I wanted them using layer masks. Here my concern was to keep as much facial detail and coloration as possible, while rendering a painterly quality. I had used a deathly white skin texture for the base render, so I avoided as much as possible adding the surrounding golden-browns back into it and losing the deathly pall.



For the book and the lectern I used three Find Edges layers set to Darken, Multiply and Overlay, in that order, erasing candle flame portion from the top two. I also added in the dripping ink, spilled wine and candle smoke layers from the previous version of the scene, all of which (save the wine spill) were created using various versions of Rons Photoshop brushes (as described in the prior post).



Finally, I laid a very low-opacity copy of the aged paper texture over the whole image (except for the smoke and wine stain layers), which leveled out the color and luminosity a bit. I then painted in some blending shadows using the burn tool on the underlying parchment layer. And there you have it. That's basically it. All together I think it took about twenty hours or so to piece together, although, of course, I'd already done a lot of work previously creating the original scene elements and lighting, not to mention the text, which is part of a much, much larger manuscript.



But that's another story.

Poser-Photoshop Test Art

I've been working a lot lately on fine-tuning an illustrative style for my render art that suits the tone and mode of my current project, so I thought I'd start posting some of the results here, both so that you can see what I've been working on, and as a sort of mini tutorial series for how it was done. First up, this Viking Meadhorn test, which was intended to look something like a pen and ink with watercolor wash, which is a style I've loved for years, from the children's illustrations of Arthur Rackham to Quinton Hoover's card art for Magic: The Gathering (neither of whom this piece resembles in the least, by the way).



The basic piece began with a fairly straightforward render using Poser's default lights and camera settings. The prop is from the recently released Drinking Horns set by Valandar (available at DAZ 3D), to which I added only an edge-blend node to add more dark shading to its curvature. I also toned down the displacement on the horn engraving, though not on the rim detail, which I left alone.



I then did two additional renders in Poser using the Sketch Designer, one on the default Pencil & Ink setting and another in a stipple style by altering the line lengths to their shortest settings. These were then combined in Photoshop to create this black and white line drawing which captures the shape and shading in a nice stark black.



A second pencil sketch variation was created using Photoshop's "Find Edges" filter (under the Stylize category) on a copy of the basic texture render. This gives a more linear, outline drawing result with a high degree of detail. This is one of the things that distinguishes an illustrative style from most other art, aside from comics, with which it is closely related. However, I didn't want a comic book look for this style, with dark black ink outlines, but rather something a bit more more stark and bold to suit the Viking world.

The next step was to bring in color, and to do this I used a trick I stumbled on by mistake one day, and for which the preceding steps are necessary. Start by creating a new layer with a copy of the basic texture render and then process it using the Brush Strokes-Ink Outlines filter. For this one I used a short stroke length of 1, with dark set low on 7 and light cranked up to 50. This creates a highlighted color tone with sharpened edges.

This is then blended with the pencil-stipple render set on Soft Light to create the bleached out blood red effect. Two copies of this are layered over the basic render, one set to Lighten and the other on Darken Color (I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but it creates the stark lights and darks that brings out the texture and the other colors). An additional layer of 25% Noise is added at 14% opacity, the Found Edges layer is blended in at 50% to bring out the "hand-drawn" details further, while the shadows are erased from the outline layers to tone them down a bit, since they multiply with each new layer added.

The final effect is kind of a dirty, well-used drinking vessel both darkened and bleached by age, with a nice metallic shine to the trim details that resembles reflected firelight. The highlights are crisp and clean with plenty of subtle texture and color, so that it layers well on any background - and all without ever touching a pen or brush.

iPad Sales Stats Addendum

Here's an updated look at the iPad sales trajectory for the first "trimester" of its life (three sales quarters, that is). As you can see, it's a happy, healthy little guy, humming along nicely on his way to tablet market dominance: iPad sales currently account for 90% of all tablets sold worldwide, figures any corporate head would kill for.



But while Apple commands their corner of the field, Amazon is holding their own just fine in the eReader duel. I came across some facts today from the International Data Corporation corroborating the figures given in my last post, and adding an additional tidbit or two of data that I found informative. An IDC report from last week broke out the current market shares of dedicated eReading devices, with the top four being:

Amazon's Kindle (41.5%)
Pandigital's Novel line (16.1%)
Barnes & Noble's Nook/NookColor (15.4%)
Sony's eReader (8.4%)
Pandigital, really? They're outselling the Nook? Wow. That came out of nowhere. Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention. The most intriguing factor here, however, is that Pandigital comes loaded with the B&N bookstore as its default ebook source, meaning Barnes & Noble have prime placement on 31.5% of eReaders being sold. This, of course, doesn't mean they're selling that many ebooks, but it's got to help. In my December 11 post I reported the "Nook bookstore" share at 10.61%, with no mention of Pandigital in the picture. But then, things change fast these days.

One disparity came out in IDC's report, which is their estimate that 10.8 million eReaders were sold in 2010, considerably more than Gartner's 6.6 million count. In addition, IDC forecasts 14.7 million units to ship this year (up from Gartner's 11 mil) and 16.6 in 2012. As far as tablets are concerned, ICD rounds out 2010 with 17 million units sold (14 of which we know are iPads, so that sounds right), with a prediction for 44.6 shipping this year, which is just about what I came up with for all eReader devices combined. That's a whole lotta personal ebookstores opening up in the coming months, which is good news for ebook authors.

eBook ISBN Uncertainties - or, Is the ISBN Outdated?

With the rapid transition from print to digital underway, a wide variety of issues have arisen - from multiple product formats to digital rights management and licensing - many of which have yet to be worked out in anything but rudimentary form. One element underlying all these issues that has bubbled to the surface lately is the waning relevance of the International Standard Book Number in the digital age. In an online scenario where no physical barcode is actually scanned and the definition of what even constitutes a "book" spans the gamut from simple text to high-tech multimedia presentations, not only is the usefulness of the ISBN as an identifier debatable, but its capacity to even fulfill that function is coming into question.



In 2007 the ISBN was updated from a 10 to a 13 digit code in order to accommodate a wider range of data. However, this may very well be a case of far too little far too late. Amazon, for example, had already by this time given up on the traditional identifier for its own uses in exchange for an internally generated ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), seen not just on ebooks, but on every product in its store. And while most items on Amazon carry both an ISBN and an ASIN, no Kindle edition has, in fact, ever had an ISBN assigned to it.



In part, this is due to the inability of the ISBN to distinguish variant ebook formats of the same title from one another in a segment of its code without having to assign an entirely unrelated ISBN to it, as if it were a different title. This is, of course, how the hardback / paperback / audiobook division was handled, but with an almost unlimited number of variations of format and content possible with digital, this becomes burdensome at best. Not only are there a half dozen major proprietary and open-source software formats in use, but there can be additional interactive content in each one, such as embedded audio and video, hyperlinked and touch-interface capabilities, different rights management encryptions employed (or not), lending-enabled editions, scanned pages versus reflowable text formats, and a wide open horizon of endless future possibilities as new media are developed and incorporated. The question then becomes what exactly is an ebook, and at what point is one version significantly different from another so as to require a unique identifier. Without a clearly defined set of criteria, and the means to differentiate them in code, no set of numbers can mean anything useful to a broad overall group involved in its production and distribution.



An additional concern is the role - and even identity of - the publisher of an ebook edition. Digital titles published for the Nook format, for example, are given an ISBN which identifies Barnes & Noble as the publisher, regardless of who actually published the print edition (mine was given a new one even though I'd already assigned one to it). This technically means that B&N "owns" the ISBN for that edition, and not me as the author/publisher. This is important because what, in fact, separates a true self-published author from an author whose book is produced by any of the many ebook distributors who reformat digital editions is the actual ownership of the ISBN: whoever owns the ISBN is the "publisher of record" (even though the rights to the work itself may remain with the author or other rights holder). Consequently, a single title in ebook format can now have many separate publishers, some of which are little more than retailers while others are megalithic literary conglomerates, a sign of how the roles are blurring in the digital age. The distinctions are obscured even further by the fact that a buyer of an ebook does not technically own the book they buy, but only purchases a license to read it.



The usefulness of an internal system by an online retailer is understandable, but the assignment of random unrelated identifiers to what is essentially the same title brings up a range of problems for everyone else, from libraries who need to catalog a title to the author who wants to track their sales across multiple platforms. Metadata conflicts are a growing concern, as voiced in the recent findings by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), who have undertaken a research project to identify and define ebook classifications with an eye to revamping the ISBN system. For more on the issues involved, you can download a pdf Summary of BISG Report Findings (1-13-2011), which outlines their initial results and recommendations. As an interim solution, in November of 2010 the International ISBN Agency released an updated set of Guidelines for the Assignment of ISBNs to eBooks (including "apps"), in the form of a 13-point F.A.Q. which is useful for any author or publisher to read.



Ultimately, as with many things, it may simply come down to a question of cost, as ISBN blocks are not only relatively expensive to purchase outright from Bowker, the U.S. agency tasked with selling and recording ISBN data, but are now often given away for free by ebook retailer-publishers (such as Barnes & Noble) or for a minor fee (as the $19 fee charged by BookBaby), or they are simply eliminated altogether (e.g. Amazon, the major ebook publisher worldwide, with whom Bowker is understandably unhappy). But unless the price of an ISBN is all but eliminated (and soon), Bowker's days as caretakers of the univeral literary cataloging system are numbered (and in single digits, too).



Current costs (or "processing fees" as they're called) to purchase ISBNs outright from Bowker are $125 for a single number (which does not, by the way, include the actual barcode graphic - that costs $25 more), or $250 for a block of ten (which is what I bought), and $575 for 1000 (it goes up from there, but at that point you're not wasting your time reading this). Believe it or not, these are the recently reduced prices designed "to accommodate the digital identification needs of authors, publishers, libraries and the supply chain at large." A year ago a block of 1000 was $995. But even at a nearly 50% price reduction for that many, who's going to buy something that someone else is giving away for free? Especially when the highest prices are being charged for the smallest quantity. If anything, they should all cost the same regardless of how many you buy, since (like ebooks) there isn't anything physical actually being produced. But then, if you want to be the actual publisher of the book, you have to pay their fee.



In the end, the only identifier that will really work is one that incorporates all the new relevant data that surrounds a digital edition of a book, both external (production data) and internal (content data). Anything short of that is irrelevant.

Latest iPad Sales Figures

Apple announced yesterday they sold 7.3 million iPads during the final quarter of 2010, bringing total sales of the device to 13.8 million since its April debut. More importantly - at least for authors - a November consumer survey by the Codex Group reports that use of the iPad as a reading device has increased to 67% of owners, with another 19% saying they intend to start reading ebooks on it. However, only 29.4% of ebooks read on those iPads were purchased through the iBookstore, while 40.3% were channeled via Amazon's Kindle store.



Another revealing statistic from the Codex report found that out of all the Ipad owners surveyed, those who purchased books bought 36% of them in digital format, while Kindle owners purchase 46% in digital. Since the overall digital market share is hovering somewhere around 10%, what this says is that as readers adopt this new technology, their reading (and book buying) habits change. Consequently, as more e-reading devices are sold, digital market share must increase accordingly. In essence, what this suggests is that if every reader owned an iPad or a Kindle today, the ebook market share would be somewhere between 36-46% rather than its current ten.

The question then becomes, how many readers will ultimately adopt the new technology. This is, of course, a topic of hot debate, not only among the literate public, but quite certainly in the corporate boardrooms of every tech and publishing company throughout the world. Gartner estimated in early December that sales of dedicated ereaders (i.e. excluding tablets or smartphones) would reach 6.6 million units by year's end - they believe that Amazon has only sold 4.4 million Kindles this year, while other guesstimates make it almost twice that number (though as always, Amazon's not commenting). Using that as a base conservative figure, that puts some 20.4 million new e-reading devices in book buyers' hands this year (tablets and dedicated devices combined).

Now here's the really exciting thing: Gartner predicts that sales of dedicated e-reading devices will increase by 68% to 11 million units next year. Assuming a relatively equivalent increase in iPad sales (and extrapolating out the nine months of iPad sales thus far), we can fairly confidently expect to see another 29 million iPads in readers' hands in twelve months' time. That's a combined 40 million new users by year's end. Those are some pretty stunning numbers. 2011 looks to be a banner year for digital.



At some point sales will likley flatten out until an equilibrium is reached. But that won't happen this year, or likely even soon, given the number of new devices slated for release this year alone, and the rate at which screen technology is improving. When the color Kindle hits the market (very likely late this year, and certainly by 2012), those numbers will explode. Even if the digital revolution tapers off by 2015, by that point it will have attained a dominant position which it will not easily relinquish, and print will indeed be dead.

More About Amazon Rankings

Recently, the good folks over at NovelRank released the results of an interesting study they undertook in order to determine how various sales events effect book rankings on Amazon. Given the recent hullabaloo concerning the "fake your rankings" ebook scandal (if you can call it that), this comes at an appropriate moment, and gives us some real and useful information rather than the "scam your way to being famous" variety we've been inundated with of late.



The criteria of the study essentially set out to disprove (or support) several common "myths" concerning how Amazon's ranking system works. Amazon won't divulge the information themselves, but the practical application of a few controlled experimental purchases provided some useful facts nonetheless. Among the most interesting discoveries was that returns do not negatively impact sales rank (i.e. the book is returned, but the sales rank remains), and that sales of a book on multiple orders increases the ranking more than multiple sales of that title on the same order (so if you're buying your own book, only buy one at a time!).



Visit the NovelRank blog post to read the details and learn more. Also, if you're an author I encourage you to employ their definitive ranking and analysis tools to your benefit. They're very cool, they're impressively fast and thorough, and best of all, they're free!



One "myth" not tackled in the study, however, was that "if you buy your way to the top, someone else will buy your book too."