images.jpegFrom a NY Times Article (by Julie Bosman via Austin American-Statesman)

E-books now make up 9 to 10 percent of trade-book sales, a rate that grew hugely this year after accounting for less than half that percentage by the end of last year. Publishers are predicting that digital sales will be 50 percent higher or even double in 2011 what they were in 2010.

January could be the biggest month ever for e-book sales, as possibly hundreds of thousands of people download books on the e-readers that they receive as Christmas gifts.

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But publishers have not yet figured out how to market e-books more effectively. Debut fiction and so-called midlist titles — books that are not large commercial successes — are particularly tough sells in digital form, said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company.

“You can have all the availability in the world, but if people don’t know the book exists, it doesn’t matter,” Hildick-Smith said.

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“My No. 1 concern is the survival of the physical bookstore,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “We need that physical environment because it’s still the place of discovery. People need to see books that they didn’t know they wanted.”

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Via Resource Shelf

2 COMMENTS

  1. Baloney! I find far more books I had never heard of through social media like the Kindle forums and book blogs. Most of the books I’ve been reading since getting my Kindle a year ago would not be found in a physical book store.

  2. I agree: In the last 1-2 years I rarely have found a “book I didn’t know I wanted”… more often than not, I went looking for a particular book, didn’t find it in the store, and went home empty-handed. The loss of the physical bookstore probably wouldn’t impact my book-buying in the least.

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