The IPKat learns from the Salt Lake Tribune (via BoingBoing) of the US Book Industry Study report, which shows that while the number of titles that have been sold during 2003/4 has increased, the number of actual books sold has dropped by 44million. This is attributed to the fact that people are reading less, preferring to entertain themselves with other media and the high price of books makes buying second hand copies more attractive.
The IPKat – doing his bit for the book industry
This decrease in book sales will certainly devalue the “monopoly” granted to authors by the copyright regime to some extent. Will this remove from those authors the incentive to produce? The IPKat thinks this unlikely, but he does predict that it will push authors towards looking for innovative (particularly electronic) means of disseminating their work.
Good books here and here