Letter from San Francisco: Amazon, again. by Guy Tiphane
We need to move on, see the wave coming, and ride it. (Warning: it may be like a tsunami.)
The pace of change in the book world is accelerating. In 2009, Indigo CEO Heather Reisman figured that 15% of her traditional book business would be eroded by e-book sales within 5 years.
On April 8, 2011, she told The Globe & Mail’s Marina Strauss, she’s looking at 40% in the net 5 years.
U.S. e-book sales are expected to nearly triple to $2.8-billion by 2015, according to Forrester Research estimates.
And an
April 11 response by Bruce Batchelor to a Quill & Quire Omni report on Strauss’s article argues:
“The change from print-books to e-books is happening even faster than Heather predicts. Some large US publishers are reporting 25% of their sales are already happening in e-book format, and none are reporting less than 10%. This is particularly noticeable in FICTION, for which print-book sales dropped 9.8% in the UK in the first quarter of 2011, compared to last year; in the US, print-book sales dropped a massive 19.3% for the past three months. [Both figures from Nielsen Book, the main industry tracking system.]"
Linda Leith
.ll.
We need to move on, see the wave coming, and ride it. (Warning: it may be like a tsunami.)
Eric Deguire explores how a television program can be a perfect match for these sad and strange times.
It’s absurd to compare the Pier, not to mention the giant Ferris wheel circling above the beach, to the gleaming perfection of the famous Assembly rooms in Bath, but absurdity is intrinsic to the Pier, so all comparisons are sublimely ludicrous.
Ceri Morgan interviews Martine Delvaux, author of Rose amer, which is published in an English translation by David Homel as Bitter Rose (Linda Leith Publishing, 2015).