What to Watch for...!!

Despite the mentionable shift in sales of printed and e-books, the fact is that people will still buy books.  They may not always buy them from a bookstore.  The online market place and e-books have made a significant dent in the shelves of many bookstores.

Immersive books in e-reader form will continue to grow and impact shelf space, and rightly so.  E-books have proven to be cheaper and far more economical to store in the home.  However, the market for non-immersive books is still alive.  There is yet to be the development of the perfect e-reader for text-books and non-fictions texts.

Penguin and Random House have merged.  Amazon has acquired “GoodReads”.  The merger of harper Collins and Simon and Schuster is still on the cards.  Hachette still stands alone.

Publishers are now playing a global market.  Penguin was the largest publisher, making between $2 billion and $3 billion annually.  That is the equivalent of 2-3 weeks income at Amazon.  It seems sensible and unavoidable for Penguin and Random House to merge.

“As the way people consume media change, book publishers are realizing they are content creation and rights management companies and not just book publishers” (Greenfield, 2014)

My purist literacy views cannot fathom the advent of the children’s picture book e-reader.  That is called television at my place.  There are more benefits to be had from reading a printed picture book than from an e-reader…..turning the page, left to right reading, the double page spread, the books passed down from brothers to sisters and vice versa….long live the page turner!!!  The bedtime story is one platform that in my belief should remain unchallenged and unchanged.  He who dares to has never shared a bedtime snuggle with a favourite story as a child or with a child.

Works Cited

Greenfield, J. (2014, January 22). Get Ready For More Mergers and Acquisitions in Book Publishing. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from www.forbes.com

Shatzkin, M. (2013). What to watch for in 2013. In The Shatzkin Files. Retrieved from http://www.idealog.com/blog/what-to-watch-for-in-2013/