The price war is on: Amazon and Barnes & Noble have cut the prices of their e-readers in response to the wildly successful iPad from Apple, which sold 2 million of the gadgets in its first 60 days on the market. E-readers are the fastest growing segment in the publishing industry, and though profit margins on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook are modest, the devices are key to attracting book lovers. Both had cost $259, but the Nook has been discounted to $199 and the Kindle to $189. In April, Goldman Sachs forecast that the number of American e-books sold would rise by 47 percent per year to reach $3.2 billion by 2015, going from 3 percent to 12.8 percent of total book sales—and that Apple’s share of that market would sharply increase, from 10 percent to 33 percent in five years.
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