I’m no economist but interesting to see Slate.com backs up my criticism of the Wall Street Journal article (see “Ebook blamed again”) – the WSJ article has “more holes in it than Albert Hall”, they say. Also, depressingly enough, they note the publishing industry’s “rule of thumb is that nine out of 10 books will not earn back their advance”. See the Slate piece here.
Publishing news coming out of the Frankfurt Bookfair is that there are no comprehensive data on sales figures for ebooks so there is no real way to tell how ebook sales are affecting pbook sales. The difficulty in getting any reliable figures, Tim Coronel says in Publishing Perspectives, is the international nature of ebooks. So sales data would need to include figures from Kobo, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Editions and Kindle and the stats would need to be broken down by country and “then be combined with local ebook sales data in each market”. Or, he suggests, publishers could pool their information. I don’t think Tim holds out much hope for the latter.