MIT’s Technology Review magazine (the spiritual successor to Wired) has a blog article on how “The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated”. The article usefully, if somewhat loosely, punctures some of the ebook/ereader hype. It also points to the dangers of a long term lock-in…
“publishers have largely made it impossible, or at least difficult, to loan, trade or re-sell ebooks”
As with all such broad whole-market sales statistics, I’d like to see some fine detail. What happens to the overall picture when we remove all Harry Potter and other series children’s books / cookery books / pulp romantic fiction from the 2008-2010 sales statistics, for instance?