Short shelflife for booksellers, industry figures claim

From the issue of October 10, 2007Guardian Unlimited

The book will still be with us in 50 years time, but the high street bookseller may not be. That, at least, is the verdict of the top book industry professionals surveyed at the start of this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the key annual book trade event which opened today.

Almost a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part in the survey predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057, while only 11% thought that the printed book would be obsolete. However, nearly as many - 10.5% - also thought that the electronic reader would be superseded. The respondents, of whom nearly half were at senior director level or above, were not asked to look into their crystal balls to predict what might replace the book and e-reader, but 44% identified the use of e-books as a key area of growth for the industry. In an increasingly globalised world, 27% saw books in translation as a growth area, and nearly a third saw China as the future dominating market in the publishing industry.

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