Published in: BookBrunch

". . .This growth takes place against the background of a depressed book market. As Michael Healy of the Book Industry Study Group pointed out in his introductory talk, book publishers had experienced flat sales for several years, and were now an industry in decline. Book retailing was contracting. But content delivery was expanding. In 1975, Kelly Gallagher said, consumers had eight choices of entertainment and information; in 2009, they had 21 choices. And, he might have added, those channels were themselves fragmented. Michael Healy reminded us that the scoop on the recent crash landing of a plane on the Hudson came not from the New York Times or Reuters, but from the passengers, through their Twitter feeds. In other words, consumers were getting information from all sorts of sources, and were losing their loyalty both to particular delivery channels and to particular ways of packaging information. To adapt, Healy said: "Publishers need to recognise that they are publishers first, and book publishers second." It was a vivid reinforcement of the familiar analysis that publishers were content providers. . . ."

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