Very interesting blog post by Evan Schnittman, an Oxford University Press executive, in which he does some calculations about the size of the eBook market based on sales of Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. Excerpt:

Jeff Bezos said last week that ebook sales in the Kindle store had hit 6% of book unit sales. What this means is that of the 125,000 titles available in the Kindle store, the sales of ebooks represented 6% of the sales of those same 125,000 titles in print formats. Another interesting thing that Bezos said was that Kindle buyers purchase at a rate of 2.5 times more than print book buyers… food for thought when thinking through your ebook strategy.

One can draw some ebook sales conclusions from this information. For example, the number 2 seller at the Kindle store is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. According to Bookscan, in 4 weeks this book has sold 784,158 units. For the sake of argument, lets ascribe 75,000 units (10% of total sales, a reasonable guess) to Amazon. If Kindle sales were 6%, then Amazon would have already sold 4,500 ebooks. That’s 4,500 people with Kindle’s buying a single title in 4 weeks!

While its clearly amazing that in one month an ebook can sell 4,500 units it is not the best way to calculate the ebook sales impact of Kindle and Reader. A better way to approach this is through good old-fashioned guess-timation. Taking stock of my own experience and the experiences of others I know, I found that ebook buying on either the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle ranges from 5 ebooks to over 100 ebooks. Assuming that anyone who buys an e-ink ebook reader is doing so to read ebooks, lets assume that 10 ebooks a year is a reasonable purchase estimate. Using this logic, we should see 10 million ebooks purchased for these two devices in 2008.

The IDPF estimates that in 2007 ebook sales income was $31,800,000 with the caveat that the actual retail income could be as much as double due to retailer discounts, so lets assume that the sales actually totaled $60,000,000. If we use an average retail price of $12 per ebook sold, and if consumers will buy 10 ebooks a year, then they will spend $120 on average, per device. That would lead us to $120,000,000 in ebook sales for the Kindle and the Reader in 2008, double all ebook sales in 2007. (For those of you who cannot swallow the idea of 10 books purchased per device – cut it in half. The result is $60,000,000 in ebook sales – as much as last year!)

Well, apparently he told a clutch of Washington Post editors that

There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

Here’s the video.

Levi Sumagaysay at GMSV is not impressed.

It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, though. True, there are people who haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years for various reasons. (The content is free on the Net. They’re trying to be green by using less paper. They don’t like getting ink on their hands. They don’t have time to read.) Yes, newspapers and magazines will continue to fold. Many will continue to lay people off or wait for them to get so sick of their jobs that they quit. And the quality of these publications will suffer, as they already have. But print media will stick around. I won’t even go into the many reasons that have to do with, um, that’s where many online publications get their content. Instead, I’ll focus on user experience. Technology has yet to deliver a replacement for the convenience of having a paper product to take along on the subway, to the bathroom (insert joke here), to the doctor’s office and to read at the checkout stand. True, some people can read newspapers and magazines on their iPhones, their Kindles. But not everyone can afford gadgets that cost hundreds of dollars, plus the monthly subscription/connection charges. Sometimes, it’s just easier to stick a couple of quarters — maybe four — into a slot and pick up a paper whose pages you can turn and fold, and which you can let your fellow commuter have when you’re done. You won’t see anyone giving up his Treo so a stranger can read the news on it. Also, you never have to worry about a newspaper running out of batteries or needing to be rebooted.

When the technology finally comes around, I’m sure lots of people will be ready for it. But the transition won’t be abrupt, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you work in the newspaper industry. And digital won’t cancel out print. They will continue to coexist, although digital will surely be more dominant.

Levi’s right. Ballmer is just the latest subscriber to what John Seely Brown calls ‘endism’. Media ecosystems don’t work like that.

Hooray! The OU is on iTunesU — one of the first three major European universities to join the project. (The others coming on board today are University College, London and Trinity College, Dublin). At last we have a proper global distribution channel for our stuff.

BBC Report here.

Tony Hirst tells the story behind this (in itself an interesting case study of how old-style media relations teams have difficulties engaging with viral-blog-type media).

Stuart Brown puts the iTunesU project in a wider context.

Martin also blogged it.

One of the interesting things about the OU offering is that we offer downloadable texts (in pdf format) as well as audio and video.

Tom Chatfield has written a terrific piece in Prospect about computer gaming.

In March, the British government released the Byron report—one of the first large-scale investigations into the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. Since then, however, the debate has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions. In one corner are the preachers of mental and moral decline; in the other the high priests of innovation and life 2.0. In between are the ever-increasing legions of gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.

The video games industry, meanwhile, continues to grow at a dizzying pace. Print has been around for a good 500 years; cinema and recorded music for around 100; radio broadcasts for 75; television for 50. Video games have barely three serious decades on the clock, yet already they are in the overtaking lane. In Britain, according to the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association, 2007 was a record-breaking year, with sales of “interactive entertainment software” totalling £1.7bn—26 per cent more than in 2006. In contrast, British box office takings for the entire film industry were just £904m in 2007—an increase of 8 per cent on 2006—while DVD and video sales stood at £2.2bn (just 0.5 per cent up on 2006), and physical music sales fell from £1.8bn to £1.4bn. At this rate, games software, currntly our second most valuable retail entertainment market, will become Britain’s most valuable by 2011. Even books—the British consumer book market was worth £2.4bn in 2006—may not stay ahead for ever.

In raw economic terms, Britain is doing rather well out of this revolution. We are the world’s fourth biggest producer of video games, after the US, Japan and Canada (which only recently overtook Britain thanks to a new generous tax regime for games companies). Here is a creative, highly skilled and rapidly growing industry at which we appear to excel. 2008, moreover, is already almost certain to top last year’s sales records thanks to the April release of the hugely hyped Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), the brainchild of Edinburgh-based company Rockstar North. Worldwide, GTA IV grossed sales of over $500m in its first week, outperforming every other entertainment release in history, including the Harry Potter books and Pirates of the Caribbean films.

The media analysis that accompanied GTA IV’s triumph was of a markedly higher quality than it would have been even a few years ago. But truly joined-up thinking about the relationships between games, society and culture is still rare…

Worth reading in full.