When you look at the stats for how people spend their time on their smartphones, not publishing books seems like a genius move for a publisher, being a web property and having a mobile friendly apps seems like a much smarter play!

Adrian, Fascinating stuff. It's actually a quite brilliant example of content used to sell services. Eoin

There's a large part of me that feels we overreact to many of these changes. First of all, literary reading has never been mass market, at best it's been a niche. Mass market reading happens (if at all) at the edges of literary, with genre and potboiler fiction that's as alien to literary elitism as facebook. Are we really observing the failure of literary reading or the fulfillment of long held desires to do other than read literary works? I suspect the later. The period we are talking about has seen the mass market adoption of technology that facilitates access to myriad other distractions, everything from online crosswords and casual gaming to video, dvd, mp3s, lolcat and everything entertainment oriented that computers and internet connections can deliver. Heck you can even immerse your avatar in a totally different world or warcraft. That said, I feel a certain concern for reading. It surely suffers from being such a flat experience to the uninitiated. The challenge for reading is to remind people faced with these endless possible distractions, time spent reading is rewarding. Personally the idea that reading is flat appalls me, to me it's as immersive as anything Linden Labs can build and what's more it's millions of times more diverse because it comes from a combination of both mine and the author's imaginations. But I can see why others might disagree. I always comfort myself with the fact that newspapers are not going out of business because people don't like reading, just they prefer to read online and ideally would rather not pay twice for it (having already paid an access fee to an ISP). That surely offers a glimmer of hope in what can sometimes seem an atmosphere of dispair. Eoin

Bernie, I think you will have a bookshelf of physical books and so will many others. The hardback versions may be more expensive than they are now, and they may be much more beautiful. What's more, I'm of the opinion that there'll also be LOTS of VERY CHEAP paperbacks still, but I'm, I think, in a minority. Ebooks, online and cloud access, chunks, apps and ways of reading I've never even thought of will form a much larger portion of the market that is for sure. Authors have lots to be hopeful about in this new environment though still will face intense competition and may never earn anything for their work. Publishers I'm not so sure about. Specifically Trade Publishers who don't specialize. I think Education/STM/Professional/Niche players have better potential though as digital developments improve their contents role and adds rather than subtracts value. As for the ipad, a total and utter distraction. A pretty one, but the money being spent on creating specific editions for it could be better spent connecting directly with readers and learning EXACTLY what they want. Eoin

Joe, I completely agree with your thoughts, though I have to admit, at a remove of a) no ipad and b) even once we get them here, no iBooks app. One question though, do you really see all your reading shifting to iPad? From what I've read so far there seems to be some concern about the weight of the device and how that would affect say commuter reading etc. One other point of concern, how do you find the device in terms of distraction, is reading holding up or are other uses cutting down your reading time? Eoin