ACRLog on Understanding Books - and the Changing Marketplace

From ACRLog:

The Economist has yet another analysis of Google Print and its “threat” to publishers. They buried the lead, though: the real impact of the Internet on traditional publishing is online sales of used books - jumping from 1% of market to 20%. (That was 2002 - I suspect it’s higher now.) Funny how that doesn’t seem to have made trade publishers reconsider their traditional practice of embargoing mass market availability for a year after hardcover. Now you can buy the hardcover at paperback cost within weeks of publication. If an industry can’t adjust to that reality, it has bigger problems than Google.