I have recently read an estimate that by next year there may be 1 billion e-books sold in the world. just how many e-books are sold is extremely difficult to state because Amazon.com, the world's largest retailer of e-books, does not provide sales figures. Amazon did announce one month in the spring of 2011 that e-book sales had exceeded mass-market paperback and hardbound sales combined, and we do know that the number and percentage of e-books sold continues to increase exponentially each year. But the exact number sold is still a secret. Hardbound books remain preferred for reading to children. And in some cases text books have been difficult to convert to the digital format because of all the graphics, charts, tables, etc. Nevertheless e-books are here to stay and on the rise. And one of the major factors in the increase of e-books sold and read is the burgeoning number of authors who are self-publishing their books.

A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor stated that readers' appetites to consume e-books are so robust that in certain genres authors are finding it difficult to keep up with demand. In what it termed an e-revolution, the paper noted that, in particular, mysteries, thrillers, and romance have become increasingly popular for downloading onto e-readers. To some degree, they seem to imply that because others cannot tell from the e-reader in the hand the title of the book being read by an individual, this newfound privacy has led to guilty pleasures - reading more of what might be considered pulp fiction or even smut. An example of this phenomenon is the success of 50 Shades of Gray by E. L James, now a New York Times best-selling book, which was originally posted on the author's web site and later self-published in e-book and print-on-demand form by an Australian virtual publisher. Critics call it mommy porn, and it is phenomenally successful. The Monitor article goes on to say that veteran author James Patterson's mysteries are so highly in demand that he has had to commit to writing 13 novels this year alone. Self-publishing authors should take note.

And yet the publishing establishment continues to fret about the phenomenon of e-books and its relationship to self-publishing. An article in the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review worries about the pricing of e-books, stating that it is not about the cost of making the book or even what the audience is willing to pay, but rather the price must be set to pay for the publisher's investment in the next project. Such thinking seems very outdated and impractical for an industry in the kind of flux that publishing now finds itself.

And Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, in a recent interview, while grudgingly admitting that Gertrude Stein self-published and allowing for the fact that he had contributed the foreword to a self-published memoir written by one of his teacher's, made the statement that, in the avalanche of self-published books being released, bad drives out good. I find it highly ironic then that, in the same interview, he identifies the worst novel he has ever read to be Dazzle by best-selling commercial author Judith Krantz, published by legacy publishers Crown and Bantam.

To his credit Dirda seems to be keeping an open mind. He asks, who knows what publishing will be like in 20 years? It's a legitimate question, but it seems clear that it will be less like what it was in the previous century and more open, more democratic, more entrepreneurial, and more digital.