Today, Jill Barshay of American Public Media's radio show Marketplace opined that ebook readers may be the death of the publishing business. She mentions the Kindle specifically. A full transcript can be found
here.
Most of the segment talks about the issues the publishers have with bookstores ordering massive numbers of books and returning them. Bookstores are trying to compete with internet retailers so they don't want to lose sales by being out of a given title and it costs them nothing to over-order. However, they conclude with this from John Rose who advises publishers at the Boston Consulting Group:
Quote:
Rose says the biggest problem publishers face is from new electronic book readers that are starting to sell, like Amazon's Kindle.
Rose: The crazy thing about the book industry is that most of the people in the book industry think about books.
In other words, Rose says the threat to book publishing isn't about returns and refunds of printed paper. It's that new technology can bypass publishing companies altogether. Rose says publishers should think about a world where any writer can publish a book cheaply online and any reader can download it freely.
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A bit alarmist, maybe, but I don't think many people would doubt that publishers will need to adapt to stay relevant in this market.