It’s official, last week e-book sales surpassed those of paper based books for the first time.

The Financial Times (April 15, 2011 by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson) reported that in February 2011, e-books sales tripled reaching $90.3 million compared with adult paperback book sales of $81.2 million. That means 9.1 million more e-books were sold than paper back books.

The numbers also showed that in January and February, e-book sales increased 169% compared with a decrease of 24.8% in paper based book sales.

The trend looks firmly entrenched especially given the ever increasing types of devices that readers can now use to view e-books including new tablets as well as the Kindle, Nook and others. RIM just announced a new tablet to compete with the iPad and a Sony tablet.

These changes will ripple throughout the publishing industry and all book related organizations. Even libraries are struggling to keep up. My library just sold off their entire CD collection in a move to digital. One wonders if books are next and if so, how will libraries transform?

Any change is sure to be gradual. One road block is that Amazon allows only limited sharing of books on the Kindle. Thus libraries can’t share books for the Kindle currently.

Even if books are eventually primarily digital, I think libraries will survive because they are so much more than book lenders. My library, like many others, is a community hub. Students meet with tutors, citizens come to hear lectures by authors or attend computer training classes, or teens just hang out.

For authors these are roller coaster times. The challenge is to adapt to e-books. Yet still profit. Perhaps e-books can even improve profit for authors. Perhaps authors will simply be lost in a tsunami of content. It seems too early to tell. The exciting part is to be in early on change and hopefully to shape change into a helpful, rather than mischievous sprite.

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