E-book self-publishing makes million-book milestone in U.S.

E-book self-publishing makes million-book milestone

“On Forbes a couple of days ago, Haydn Shaughnessy wrote an interesting blog post noting that, assuming the trend of the last few years remains in effect, over one million people in the United States alone wrote e-books over the last twelve months. (Or at least, over one million e-books were self-published. If some people wrote more than one book, it could potentially be fewer than one million authors.)”

I’m not entirely sure I agree with this. I think that maybe one million people self-published a book in the last year. I question that all are new books or even written in the past two years. Lots of books, like golden oldie albums and songs, are getting republished in a new format.

I wonder if people buy favourite books in new formats as many times as I’ve replaced my favourite musicians in the tour through vinyl, cassette, 8-track, CD-ROM, MP3 . . .

I doubt individuals do that for books to the same extent that libraries will purchase mutiple formats.

Stephen