At the risk of being completely wrong, my forecast for the next big thing is Google E-Books. Amazon's Kindle E-Book sales are projected to be $612 million in 2010. Google knows how to reach the international market so my estimate is that Google E-Books will overtake Amazon some time next year. The positive side of the E-Book market, as Amazon puts it is, "For books that are available on the Kindle, sales are already 35 percent of the same books in print"
There are some interesting articles to be written on this subject. The peer-to-peer phemomenon has hurt the traditional music industry so much that "retail value of the music industry slipped $7 million last year to $12.27 billion". The significantly larger $35-billion-a-year book business will want to know who is sharing their books but are unlikely to ever find out. Whether knowledge sharing of this magnitude is a good or a bad thing, for the global economy, has yet to be seen.
Have we actually learned from history: "E-books sparked a flurry of excitement in 2000 when best-selling author Stephen King experimented with the format. Since then, however, analysts said the format has largely disappointed, both in terms of sales and in the technology used to access them."
I'll let history decide.
