eBooks will reduce book sales, but not for the reasons you state.

First, you’re underestimating piracy. Pirates are clever. They’ll get around DRM just like they’ve gotten around it in the music and movie industry. It’s not hard. They’re already doing it.

Second, you’re confusing sales dollar volume with sales unit volume. As all the comments prove, eBook readers encourage people to buy more books, not less.

However, the price of eBooks are 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of physical books. Therefore, eBook readers will have to buy 2x to 3x more books so that the industry doesn’t see any revenue loss. That’s unlikely to happen.

The same thing happened with music. Volume has soared thanks to iTunes, but revenue has crashed. DRM hasn’t saved the music industry, nor will it save the book industry.

Francis Tapon

I’ve been reading almost exclusively in eBook formats for several years now (about 98%), and I find that I actually buy more books in advance than I did before, as I can have several to many choices for when I finish a book, especially when I’m reading a series that I am catching up on. This way, if I finish up a book halfway through my lunch hour, I can start reading the next in the series right away! Or, if I feel like something else, I’ve got plenty to choose from as well.

I can see the point a bit as the Amazon Kindle (and yes, I have one) has built in data-connectivity and a functional store portal on the device, but even so, I still find I do the same thing with books in the Kindle format: Buy them when convenient, not when needed.

I estimate that my spending on books has doubled since I started to buy e-books.

I buy the same number of hard copy books as I have in the past. After all, I only like to read novels as e-books. For everything else, I want hard copies.

I agree with Walt that my e-book purchases are additional and rarely replace my hard copy purchases.

Technology is moving extremely fast and at the end of the day you have to see who is winning.

When music and movies became freely available on the internet to download, both those industries suffered.

Today less movies are made, large studios have hung onto fanchises, Batman did well this year, so there no way Warner Bros will not do another one and another one, Spiderman 4 and 5 are both coming out from Sony. Can you think of anything Sony pictures have made this year?

The music industry has had very low sales and people just say, people are not into music anymore. I doubt that is true, I think its because people will download it for free and not buy the actual album in a record store. From this many people have seen record stores close down over the years.

I think with ebooks if not managed correctly, large amounts of books will become free and no one will win. Imagine all of John Grishams books become available for free online ( like they not already ) and random house tells him he cant write anymore books and they do not sell. The reader looses out on new and excellent reading material.

I think Sandra’s above comment that if the author is not available on Kindle she not reading them is lame. I think its more your lose to the great author or novels then to ebook readers.

I think the saving of the trees, transport and other costs in using the ebooks and kindle will help the earth and money. I think bookstores will have to change and adapt. I think if managed correctly, publishers will have markets for published books and electronic books. I myself prefer the printed book. I have downloaded alot of ebooks – ie the full chronicles of narnia series for free and read it. So I think publishers must be very careful how they promote ebooks, as so much can be lost before they know it.

Lets see what happens in the future