Links of the week May 6 2013 (19)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
6 May 2013
Tim Waterstone has two words of advice for any aspiring book shop owner - don't bother. A passionate supporter of the high street, and in the past a sceptic when it came to electronic books, Waterstone is now having his doubts. He fears that life for small shops in Britain's town centres is all but impossible in the face of high costs and chain-store competition. And once a dedicated believer in ink and paper, Waterstone is now a director at an electronic publisher.
Withall the upheaval in bookselling over the past decade -- the surge in onlineordering, the multiple challenges faced by brick and mortar booksellers, andthe squabbles over e-book pricing -- you would think the book industry was incrisis. But sales figures suggest otherwise. Increasingly, this churningappears to be an integral feature of a steady process of transformation in thedigital age.