PwC Projects Consumer eBook Market Surpassing Print by 2017

Laura Hazard Owen posted a fascinating article on paidContent a few days ago that began to generate a lot of buzz. Auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released a report yesterday that projected that the U.S. consumer ebook market will be bigger than the print book market by 2017. Let’s review that again. B-I-G-G-E-R. That’s… er, big news.

2017 isn’t far off and these projections, are in line with other reporting firms. (Laura Hazard Owen gets into it in her article, check it out.) This follows a trend were seeing all over. According to research firm Pew Internet, we’re seeing a huge spike in mobile-only users. (17% of adults) It makes sense that these same users would be consuming all sorts of media—even books—on their mobile devices.

Not that it isn’t already, but if these numbers are even remotely accurate the publishing space is going to get very interesting over the next five years. It’s crazy times we write in.