Steve Haber, the President of Sony’s Digital Reading division, has predicted that e-books sales will supersede the sales of traditional books within the next five years.

He reported that the market will sell more digital content than physical content. The books will go the same way as the music industry, with digitisation as an inevitable process that will accelerate over the next few years.

Earlier they thought that the process would take a decade, but now they have revised the prediction down to five years. The reason for this rethink is the more rapid spread of e-reader devices, such Amazon Kindle, and Sony’s Reader, Sony iPad and many more.

Currently, e-books sales account for less than one per cent of total book sales in the UK and the publishing giants have claimed that it will take a lot more than five years for ebooks to overtake traditional books, as e-books have a much smaller user base to start from.

Even so, the growing pace of e-book sales and the launch of a number of e-book readers, such as the Sony e-reader and Amazon Kindle, coupled with the availability of ebooks for Apple's new iPad through its iBookstore have all helped the market to expand.