Old-Fashioned Books Are Back In Business
Planning to buy any e-readers or e-books as presents during your Christmas shopping sprees this year? Then you may be interested that this would buck the national trend.
Yes, the question now being asked is whether these items have had their day.
Booksellers certainly think so.
Both Waterstones and Foyles have opened some new stores this year, after several years of contraction and consolidation.
The battle to attract readers to buy books is going to be fought nowhere more keenly than in Birmingham where Foyles has just opened its new outlet in Grand Central while Waterstones has two stores and is pouring money into a refurb of the one on the High Street.
Both of these print purveyors experienced a resurgence of old-fashioned book sales last Christmas which gave them the confidence to invest.
Given that recent figures show e-book demand taking a two per cent dive and printed books a three per cent increase in the first half of this year, it might be a smart move.
Anyway, according to other data, paper versions of books still completely outgun the electronic ones by taking 84 per cent of the market. The standalone e-reader is fading even more quickly, with sales almost halved from their 2012 peak.
Only a third of such e-books that so get purchased are now actually read on e-readers, anyway, as more devotees use tablets, and even phones, to multi-task with their e-reading.
Yet perhaps there is simply an allure with the conventional paperback, which the bookworm digests while curled in an armchair or lying on the beach, then passes around friends and family until the cover gets dog-eared, that the Kindle just can’t emulate.
