eBook Sales to Hit $1 Billion By Year’s End, $3 Billion by 2015

With the holiday season just gearing up and sales of eBooks and eBook readers likely to go into overdrive, analyst firm Forrester is predicting that 2010 will finish with just under $1 billion in eBooks sales.

According to Forrester’s five-year forecast for eBooks in the U.S., 2010 will end with a total of $966 million in eBook sales. Furthermore, the eBook market is ready to triple itself, with $3 billion in sales by 2015.

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It’s been a big year for the eBook. According to the Association of American Publishers, eBook sales have increased by 193% over the previous year and sales are continuing to surge. Earlier this summer, eBooks surpassed hard copies on Amazon.com, and just last month Amazon announced that Kindle books were outselling print bestsellers by a two-to-one margin. 

We spoke briefly to James McQuivey, the author of the Forrester report, who told us that Forrester came to its numbers by asking consumers who have eReader devices how much they spend on eBooks. In the end, he told us, the average eBook consumer spends $60 over the year on eBooks. According to McQuivey, many publishers said they expected the number to be even higher from what they had seen with purchasing patterns. McQuivey offers a snapshot of the eBook consumer market in his blog post:

Just 7% of online adults who read books read eBooks. But that 7% happens to be a very attractive bunch: they read the most books and spend the most money on books. And here’s the kicker – the average eBook reader already consumes 41% of books in digital form. Oh, and that includes the people who don’t have an eReader yet, which is nearly half of them. For those that have a Kindle or other eReader, they read 66% of their books digitally.

According to McQuivey, once people start reading eBooks instead of traditional print media, they’re hooked, meaning the shift to eBooks is well under way. “From here,” he predicts, “things will move so quickly that by the time the dust settles, the book business may actually be the most digital of all media industries, even if it got the latest start.”

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