Gina Centrello: EBooks Will Be 50% Of Book Sales In Five Years

In five years eBooks will be 50% of book sales, said Gina Centrello, President and Publisher of The Random House Publishing Group during a lunch today at Thrillerfest. Her estimates are based on recent growth. She said that last year eBooks represented 3% of the market and this year it will be about 10%.

Because eBooks are the next wave, Centrello questions if digital books should become more than just a channel of distribution and encouraged a room full of publishing industry people to consider adding music and video to books when it makes sense. Still, she thinks that a book will still be about story.

While a technology may change, Centrello said that a publisher’s core mission remains the same: To deliver books to readers. “A publisher’s job is to deliver books in any form that the reader wants to read them,” she said.

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