Ars on the state of the eBook market

This is a very good article on Ars Technica about the state of the eBook market.

I used to read quite a lot of Baen books on my palm, and I still do it to some extent, but it has diminished for several reasons:

- First Baen seems to be the only publisher that offers books in DRM free multiformat, so I only bought from that one publisher, which is somewhat limiting.

- Second there are a lot of other media competing for my reading time. Music, Video, Games (Nintendo DS) and short stories webzines published for free on the web (such as Aphelion) all compete with professional eBooks for my time.

5 years ago you couldn't get a satisfactory Video or gaming experience in a pocket format, now most PMPs and portable games consoles deliver this. the problem for publishers is that these compete with eBooks AND printed sales. This doesn't mean I won't buy eBooks from Baen again (I still look at their new offerings from time to time), but this means that book publishers really need to get their act straightened up or they will lose even their printed market.

I think the publishers that get it will get a decent market share however. After all, if you count the eBooks I bought more novels from Baen Books that from any other publisher in the last 10 years.