Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry<\/p>\n
Jun 5th 2008 | LOS ANGELES<\/p>\n
JEFF BEZOS, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, destination for nearly four-fifths of online book buyers, appears harmless. But to some in the publishing industry, he looms like a recurring nightmare. Having upset booksellers’ apple-carts in the 1990s with his online stores, he is now widening his assault on the industry, as he personably explained in a speech at Book Expo America (BEA), a trade fair in Los Angeles, on May 30th.<\/p>\n
From the outside, book publishing looks like an impregnable edifice: 411,000 new titles were published in America last year, and more than 3 billion books sold there. Growth was 4.3% in the “adult trade” segment, the mainstay of the market. In fact, the existing order is fragile. Reading in America, as in many rich countries, is down. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, says leisure reading is declining, especially among the young. Since 1985, books’ share of entertainment spending has fallen by seven percentage points.<\/p>\n
Read it on The Economist’s site…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry Jun 5th 2008 | LOS ANGELES JEFF BEZOS, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, destination for nearly four-fifths of online book buyers, appears harmless. But to some in the publishing industry, … (more…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magazines","category-the-economist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}