another 25% of units sold online, and roughly half of all unit sales will be on the Internet."Nowhere is the e-book tidal wave hitting harder than at bricks-and-mortar book retailers. The competitive advantage Barnes & Noble spent decades amassing—offering an enormous selection of more than 150,000 books under one roof—was already under pressure from online booksellers.
It evaporated with the recent advent of e-bookstores, where readers can access millions of titles for e-reader devices.
Even more problematic for brick-and-mortar retailers is the math if sales of physical books rapidly decrease: Because e-books don't require paper, printing presses, storage space or delivery trucks, they typically sell for less than half the price of a hardcover book. If physical book sales decline precipitously, chain retailers won't have enough revenue to support all their stores.
"It's fair to say that the leadership folks at the major trade publishers didn't believe until very recently that e
-books had any economic life in them," Arthur Klebanoff, chief executive of New York-based RosettaBooks LLC, an e-book publisher.
It may be a sad state of affairs to see all these bookshops vanish, but it is inevitable that the industry will change, indeed is currently in the process of the greatest change since the paperback novel was invented. Take a look at the graph on the left and you will see that since last year there has been a -5% drop overall in physical book sales but a 190% increase in digital sales.
Regular books will be around for some time to come but they will have to exist alongside their electronic versions.
No comments:
Post a Comment