"At Digital Book World - only a month ago - there seemed to be consensus that the ebook tipping point would occur around 2014. That seems too slow to me now. Based on what we're seeing in our current data, I think we may well be at the tipping point and that certainly has a lot of implications. I suspect that we're going to see some dramatic reassessment when publishers look at their numbers at the end of first quarter, 2011. And for certain types of books, ebook units this year may be more than 50% of units sold."

It's not clear from the blog whether the sales growth is coming from Kindle books, enhanced ebooks, or apps, but the message as ever from Dominique is loud and clear. As it says on the SourceBooks website: "For more than a decade, Sourcebooks has been the leading publisher of books that integrate great content, exciting visuals, and multimedia that brings it all alive. But in a way we’ve been limited by physical technology. At last, the digital age has caught up."

Sourcebooks' pioneering role notwithstanding, I think this is one to keep an eye. Since last year, e-book predictions seems to have been scaling ever upwards. In the UK, the current consensus appears to be that e-books will be between 3% and 7% of trade sales by the end of the year: but I wouldn't be surprised if it was higher.

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Source: FutureBook