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E-book publishers are now being investigated in the US, not just Europe
Just two days after the European Commission announced that it was investigating Apple and major international publishers for possible e-book price fixing, the US Justice Department has made it clear that it's also launching a probe into the possibility of "anticompetitive practices involving e-book sales." Although Justice Department officials didn't name which companies they're looking into, it's very likely that they're focusing on the same agreements between publishers and the major e-book platform owners -- either Apple or Amazon or both.
Forrester: e-book sales to hit nearly $1 billion this year, $3 billion by 2015
There's no denying that e-books are already big business, and market research firm Forrester is now offering some pretty impressive numbers that show just how big it already is, and how much bigger it will get in the next few years. The firm surveyed some 4,000 people and found that while just seven percent of those actually read e-books, they still bought enough of them to translate to $966 million in sales this year -- a number that's projected to grow to $3 billion by 2015. As for the reading habits of that seven percent, Forrester found that they "read the most books and spend the most money on books," and that they read 41 percent of their books in digital form. That doesn't necessarily mean that they use actual e-readers, though -- a full 35 percent apparently do most of their e-book reading on a laptop, followed by 32 percent on a Kindle, 15 percent on an iPhone, 12 percent on a Sony e-reader, and ten percent on a netbook. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Kindle users seem to be the biggest boosters of e-books -- they do 66 percent of all their reading in digital form.
