ReadWriteWeb

eBook sales almost doubled over 2010 and now make up 9% of total consumer book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. This growth was fueled by intense competition amongst eReader manufacturers over 2010. Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook and others attempted to undercut each other throughout the year. Further, the iPad arrived in 2010 and added to the choices for eBook consumers.

eBooks started to take off in 2009, but in 2010 things really heated up. Speaking as a consumer who has just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's nearly 600-page novel Freedom on my iPad's Kindle app, I can attest that eBooks are here to stay! Let's look back then at a busy year in the eReader and eBook market.

Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Amazon has enabled a new feature in its Kindle store: e-book gift giving. Amazon's customers will now be able to give Kindle books to anybody with an e-mail address, whether they are existing Kindle users or not. According to Amazon, the Kindle store is "the first major bookstore to offer eBook gifting," though as we reported yesterday, the Kobo store now also allows its users to purchase e-books as gifts.

Yesterday we gave you 5 reasons why you should read your next book on an eReader device. Needless to say, many paper book fans protested in the comments. And with good reason. Paper books have many things going for them and it's still early in the evolution of eBooks.

This is a technology blog. However, in order to highlight how far eBooks have to go until they seriously challenge for the hearts and minds of book lovers, we present here a list of reasons why paper books are still better than eBooks. We'll also speculate about how eBooks might match each feature that paper books currently have over them.

Recently I began to buy eBooks for the Kindle application on my iPad. While I still love paper books, the digital wiles of eBooks are looking increasingly attractive to me. Below are five eBook features that may tempt you to buy electronic books too.

I should note that I wasn't a hold-out on eBooks for moral reasons. I simply couldn't access them until recently. Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook have all been either unavailable to people outside the US, or the eBook stores to populate them have been inaccessible. However with the Kindle for iPad, I've finally been able to enjoy the forbidden fruit of eBooks.

Barnes & Noble just announced the launch of a Wi-Fi-only version of its Nook e-book reader. This new version of the Nook will retail for $149. In addition, B&N also dropped the price of the 3G-enabled Nook to $199. Besides being Wi-Fi-only, the new version of the Nook is virtually identical to the Nook 3G. It will come with the same set of features as the original Nook, including the ability to lend some e-books to friends and use B&N's "Read in Store" feature to browse complete books on the Nook while using B&N's in-store Wi-Fi network.

Dedicated e-readers like Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook are coming under increasing pressure from mobile phones and tablet devices like the iPad. According to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media, sales of e-readers with broadband connections will peak in 2014, as users decide to opt for multi-purpose devices like the iPad. According to Informa, the best way for e-reader manufacturers to survive is to focus on cheap devices that don't feature built-in wireless connectivity.

Sony just announced that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony's e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices.

According to Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos, "millions of people now own Kindles." Sadly, Amazon has always kept the exact number of Kindle sales under wraps. According to some analysts, consumers in the US bought roughly 3 million e-readers in 2009 and the majority of these were probably Kindles. Amazon also doesn't release any data about how many e-books it sells. In a press release that accompanied the company's Q4 earnings report, however, Amazon yesterday announced that it now sells six Kindle books for every 10 physical books when both editions are available.

Copia, a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia's e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers, as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books.

There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. Today, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. Forrester now expects that 3 million eReaders will be sold in 2009 and that 30% of these will sell during the holiday season. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders. For 2010, Forrester projects eReader sales of up to 10 million.