I think that it's a matter of being able to be willfully blind to what is coming. The car manufacturers can see that oil reserves are getting lower and that fuel emissions pollute the air but it's easier to turn a blind eye to statistics about pbooks vs. ebooks since it is a digital medium that is being talked about. You can demonstrate a real steam turbine or gasoline engine, but fusion power is still more theory than actual for example. We tend to believe more in what we can see, hear, touch and measure with our own senses than some mathmatical formula that says something like pbooks are declining in popularity and ebooks are rising at the same rate. It's not as real when it's a mathmatical abstraction on paper as opposed to a warehouse that suddenly is a lot more empty than it was five yrs ago.
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Originally Posted by CazMar
I don't dispute the figures or the fact that all of this is happening - but with so many people saying it was going to happen (and don't forget sites like Teleread have been around for years talking about the advent of ebooks etc etc), why do the book publishers now seem surprised by all of this? Car manufacturers are working flat out to try to produce electric cars, hybrid cars etc because they know gasoline engines have a limited number of years, but book publishers act like they have been suddenly hit with this "digital" stuff.
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