So much so that, in 2012, global revenue from mobile advertising and content will hit $67 billion, according to a new Strategy Analytics forecast.

That is the remainder of the firm’s total mobile media category projection of $149.8 billion, which includes a projected 9.5 percent increase in mobile data subscription sales to $82.8 billion. The details:

App growth

• App downloads will grow 38 percent to 23 billion.
• App spend will grow 30.7 percent to $26.1 billion.
• Apps will make up 18.9 percent of mobile media outlay.

Ad growth

• Mobile ad spend will grow 85.4 per cent to $11.6 billion.
• In-app ad sales in the US and western Europe will overtake mobile web display sales ($934.5 million).

Video slow-mo

• “Despite the huge audience of 271 million users, ad revenues from mobile video are tiny – a meagre $223 million globally in 2011.”

UK e-book sales revenue will overtake hardbacks in 2014 and close in on paperbacks by 2016, an Oliver & Ohlbaum (O&O) forecast presented to London Book Fair’s Digital Minds conference showed.

Amazon and Waterstones reported e-book sales overtook hardbacks by volume last year. The lag indicates the lower prices that digital content can fetch compared with physical counterparts.

“While current publisher margins are higher on e-books than physical books, average retail prices are lower,” O&O said.

The analyst house reckons a quarter of the UK population will regularly buy e-books by 2017 – that is 40 percent of all regular book-buyers.

All of that will push total UK book sales by volume up 8.5 percent by 2017, O&O reckons. But, thanks to that dimes-for-dollars challenge, retail value will dip by 10 percent over the same period.

O&O thinks half of books, regardless of format, will be sold online by 2015.

Meanwhile, Sony’s Reder Store e-book store, first unveiled in the U.S. in 2006, finally rolled out in the UK today, despite Sony having earlier committed to an October 2011 launch.