What the ebook world looks like: from Book Business magazine webinar

I attended a Book Business magazine webinar recently.  Here are my notes from “On-Demand Publishing: The Bottom Line.”

The market growth is in the on-demand sector:

• Traditional book publishing title introductions declined by -3.2% in 2008
• 285,394 on-demand titles were introduced in 2008; a 132% increase

On-demand production has increased by 462% since 2006.

The future is all e-everything.

The ebook market is very small, but growing:

• 1.5% of book sales were ebooks in 2008
• 2.5% of book sales were e-books in Q1 2009

There is a renewed interest in ebook readers, such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader.

There is anecdotal success in niche markets, for example, in romance novels.

The future looks bright due to a push toward color display and the refinements coming with e-ink and e-paper.

A representative from IBT Global gave some interesting figures on warehouse storage for printed books vs. disk storage for ebooks waiting to be ordered:

• Warehouse square footage costs $8 – $12
• A pallet of printed books hold 2,387 books
• Takes 13 sq. ft. of floor space, or $130, which is $.054 per book

• A 20-terabyte server holds more than 230,000 titles
• Takes up 6 sq. ft. of floor space, or $60, which is $.00026 per book

Just a different perspective on what is costs to store the hard copy and the electronic versions.  Your thoughts?