eBooks set to flourish

A good point made by James McQuivey, analyst at Forrester Research...

"Book publishers need to take digital seriously... they must make it the new default for publishing, preparing for a day in which physical book publishing is an adjunct activity that supports the digital publishing business. And this dramatic reversal will have happened faster in book publishing than in any other media business. Not just because publishers have had years to watch other media industries face the digital transition, but also because book publishing is a single-revenue business. 

Music used to generate revenue from the radio, from CD sales, and from concert tickets. Changing that business required upsetting several apple carts at once. TV is similarly complex, revenue is derived from advertising, cable carriage or retransmission fees, and direct sales of DVDs. You can’t go digital without first rethinking the entire business (and not every player in the ecosystem takes that lying down). 

But not publishing. Books are published and sold at retail. In the end, once the only channel from which revenue is derived starts to get remodeled, it’s not long before the whole structure gets torn down and rebuilt to accommodate the new dominant distribution model. 

That’s why we pause to commemorate the crossing of the billion-dollar threshold, because from here things will move so quickly that by the time the dust settles, the book business may actually be the most digital of all media industries, even if it got the latest start."

Expect to see 'sad bookshelves' like this one!