The Surprise That Isn’t

June 7th, 2004 · No Comments
by Booksquare

The recent announcement that sales of ebooks increased in the first quarter of 2004 reminded us that it wasn’t quite a year ago that funeral arrangements were underway for the medium. After all, if you couldn’t buy them from Barnes and Noble, where could you buy them? We were being rhetorical, of course Powell’s would be our first destination. We never bought into the “I prefer to hold something” argument, especially given the fact that an entire generation is growing up with fingers attached to keyboards. Perhaps it was that the Internet made all revolutions seem so effortless — ebook advocates couldn’t fathom how they could fail in their coup. We actually prefer the slow, steady (with explosions from time to time, just to shake things up) growth of this market. It means, to us, that it will become a viable revenue stream rather than a failed experiment. Now if we could just convince e-only publishers to, um, improve their websites. That would really help sales!

File Under: Publishers and Editors