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02-10

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Return to print allays bookseller fears of digital apocalypse

Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.

As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, increasing 1,259 per cent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalise their business.

Then in 2011, the industrys fears were realised when Borders declared bankruptcy.

"E-books were this rocket ship going straight up," said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. "Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music."

But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print or becoming hybrid readers who toggle between devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 per cent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 per cent of the market, roughly the same as a few years ago.

E-books declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

E-book subscription services, modelled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.

The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 members with stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 members with 1,660 locations five years ago.

"The fact that the digital side of the business has levelled off has worked to our advantage," said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. "Its resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time."

Publishers, seeking to capitalise on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 20,000 square metres to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 18,000 square metres.

Penguin Random House has invested nearly $US100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 34,000 square metres last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Indiana, more than doubling the size of the warehouse.

"People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business," said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 per cent of the companys sales in the United States.

The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months. Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 per cent.

Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.

"Its a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold," Dohle said.

At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Texas, sales are up nearly 11 per cent this year over last, making 2015 the stores most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilisation of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random Houses so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.

"The e-book terror has kind of subsided," he said.

Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.

"Weve seen people coming back," said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado. "They were reading more on their Kindle and now theyre not, or theyre reading both ways."

Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.

The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobos e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.

But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 per cent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.

Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.

As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $US12.99 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.

On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 per cent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.

Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.

"Maybe its just a pause here," said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. "Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?"

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英譯漢批改文章原文在這裡Artificially produced water delivers Israel from drought，漢語沒找到：

With its part-Mediterranean, part-desertclimate, Israel had suffered from chronic shortages and exploitation of itsnatural water resources for decades.

The natural fresh water at Israel』sdisposal in an average year does not cover its total use of roughly 525 billiongallons. The demand for potable water is projected to rise to 515 billiongallons by 2030, from 317 billion gallons this year.

The turnaround came with a seven-yeardrought, one of the most severe to hit modern Israel, that began in 2005 andpeaked in the winter of 2008 to 2009. The country』s main natural water sources— the Sea of Galilee in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers — wereseverely depleted, threatening a potentially irreversible deterioration of thewater quality.

Measures to increase the supply and reducethe demand were accelerated, overseen by the Water Authority, a powerfulinterministerial agency established in 2007.

Desalination emerged as one focus of thegovernment』s efforts, with four major plants going into operation over the pastdecade. A fifth one should be ready to operate within months. Together, theywill produce a total of more than 130 billion gallons of potable water a year,with a goal of 200 billion gallons by 2020.

Israel has, in the meantime, become theworld leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86percent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about55 percent of the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel,recycling 17 percent of its effluent, while the United States recycles just 1percent, according to Water Authority data.

Before the establishment of the WaterAuthority, various ministries were responsible for different aspects of thewater issue, each with its own interests and lobbies.

「There was a lot of hydro-politics,」 said Eli Feinerman of thefaculty of agriculture, food and environment at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem, who served for years as a public representative on the authority』scouncil. 「The right hand did not know what the left was doing.」

The Israeli government began by making hugecuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagantoveruse of heavily subsidized water for agriculture.

The tax for surplus household use wasdropped at the end of 2009 and a two-tiered tariff system was introduced.Regular household water use is now subsidized by a slightly higher rate paid bythose who consume more than the basic allotment.

Water Authority representatives went houseto house offering to fit free devices on shower heads and taps that inject airinto the water stream, saving about a third of the water used while stillgiving the impression of a strong flow.

Officials say that wiser use of water hasled to a reduction in household consumption of up to 18 percent in recentyears.

And instead of the municipal authoritiesbeing responsible for the maintenance of city pipe networks, local corporationshave been formed. The money collected for water is reinvested in theinfrastructure.

Mekorot, the national water company, builtthe national water carrier 50 years ago, a system for transporting water fromthe Sea of Galilee in the north through the heavily populated center to thearid south. Now it is building new infrastructure to carry water west to east,from the Mediterranean coast inland.

In the parched Middle East, water also hasstrategic implications. Struggles between Israel and its Arab neighbors overwater rights in the Jordan River basin contributed to tensions leading to the1967 Middle East war.

Israel, which shares the mountain aquiferwith the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than itis obliged to under the existing peace accords. The Palestinians say it is notenough and too expensive. A new era of water generosity could help fosterrelations with the Palestinians and with Jordan.

Desalination, long shunned by many as acostly energy guzzler with a heavy carbon footprint, is becoming cheaper,cleaner and more energy efficient as technologies advance. Sidney Loeb, an Americanwho was one of the scientists who invented the popular reverse osmosis method,came to live in Israel in 1967 and taught the water professionals here.

The Sorek desalination plant rises out ofthe sandy ground about nine miles south of Tel Aviv. Said to be the largestplant of its kind in the world, it produces 40 billion gallons of potable watera year, enough for about a sixth of Israel』s roughly eight million citizens.

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