This year thousands of Australians are set to get a Kindle electronic book reader for Xmas according to Amazon, with the online store set to benefit from the device sale as owners go hunting for their favourite books.
According to the US online store Australians purchased double the number of eBooks this year than what they did last year and they anticipate that sales will double in 2012.
Amazon already sells more eBooks than paperbacks. It claims sales of Kindle devices have reached 1m a week, while 13m iPads will find a home this quarter. Juniper Research forecasts 25m e-readers sales globally this year, and 55.2m tablet sales.
Grahame Samuel the former Chairman of the Australian competition & Consumer Commission is an avid Kindle user, however he is concerned that the book industry is still trying to control the availability of books along with the price set to Australians.
The Guardian newspaper claimed recently that regulators, both in Europe and the United States, are worried that shoppers may be overpaying. This month, both the European commission and the US department of justice have announced investigations into ebook sales. They are to lift the lid on a power struggle between the publishing industry and Amazon that could determine the shape of book trading for years to come.
The European commission will probe the "agency" deals signed between Apple and five of the biggest publishers: Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan, all of them publishers who have major investments in Australia.
The publishers in Australia are desperate to prop up book stores according to several book industry executives.
"Without their support we would see book stores disappear overnight" said one leading book store executive in Sydney.
Publishers are worried that Amazon's aggressive discounting and their rampant growth in Australia would devalue their electronic product. The Guardian said that the publishers agreed to a business model proposed by Apple just before the release of the first iPad. It was a move intended to force the world's largest bookseller to relinquish control over pricing.
