Online Book Market Expected to Double by 2010

According to a recent report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., the online book market is expected to reach $9.5 billion by 2010. It was currently estimated at $4.8 billion in 2007. This report refers to online book purchasing and shouldn't be confused with online ebooks.

Presumably, consumers are looking for some peek into a books' content before making an online purchase and we know that's facilitated with XML and good metadata. Interestingly, at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference a couple weeks ago, I still met people from highly-regarded publishing houses who have not transformed their content into XML. Many understand that it's important and they want to XMLize content but justifying front-end costs continue to challenge them and figuring out where XML fits into their workflow is daunting.

Well, this report may be the one to drop on the CFO's desk to justify the cost.