[darryl]

What I found quite interesting was John Grisham's statement that he is selling about half the books he was years ago, yet his books are still at or near the top of the charts. KKR believes this is a good result amongst best sellers. If best sellers are turning over far less books than they would have done in the past, what is the explanation? KKR talks about Grisham being cut back to only his core readers, missing out on those non hard core readers who bought because of convenience and high availability everywhere, at airports for instance. This probably does play a role, but I'm sure there are other reasons.

Are there less readers? Are people reading less? Perhaps, though I rather doubt it. Certainly many of us on Mobileread are reading even more, though we are not of course typical. I suspect the main reason is that there are more readers reading more books, but this increase in demand is far exceeded by the exponential increase in supply. I also think best sellers such as Grisham also suffer from the high ebook prices set by their publishers. Ebooks are discoverable everywhere and immediately available. When you take your ereader to the airport you don't need to buy from a bookshop and their carefully curated selection of paperback blockbusters. There is an Amazon store right there with you. This of course fits in quite well with KKR's reasoning referred to above. Many travellers who just wanted something not terrible to read on the plane who would have visited the airport shop and bought John Grisham's latest on the front table at $15.99 are no longer doing so.