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.
The Shenzhen Economic Daily was preparing a 3-page feature on the publication of Shenzheners, the first of the Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei's books to appear in English, and I was asked to write about why LLP chose to publish the collection. What follows is the text I wrote, which Yiwei then translated into Chinese.
I don’t know how many times I have to explain this to you people.
Ah, a book for me, I thought. Every time I have taken the Myers-Briggs test (or a variation of it), I have been on the 100% Introvert end of the scale from Introvert to Extrovert.
Literary non-fiction from Yoko Morgenstern.
Photo: Danny Stoeker
