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August 9, 2011

Publishing on the up-and-up

While booksellers are hurting, publishers are bouncing back. The bounce is observed particularly in fiction, whose death knell has so often been rung.

How could this be happening? Could it be that e-books and online mail-order have given publishers a more efficient channel to readers? Bookstores like Borders seemed like such sumptuous palaces of consumerism, surrounding us with all those appealing titles. How could even Amazon cross-market any better than that? Here's a sincere question: how are people discovering books in the post-Borders world?

(Admittedly, the study seems to have included some "mobile apps" in the results, but hopefully they're not counting Angry Birds under fiction or textbooks; perhaps only book-like mobile apps get counted.)