The death of the book?

Barnes & Nobles has decided to explore selling the brand, as a unfortunate symptom of changing consumer preferences towards e-books and other digital media. So does that mean the death knell is ringing for the good old book?

Let's hope not....while consumer preferences are changing, there is still a significant number of people who patronize the old book. Sure it's big, and bulky and sometimes a nuisance to carry around, but there's nothing  like leafing through its pages to get the story, unlike the cold unimaginative reader...yes i'm a fan of the book. But unfortunately demand is not the same, especially as there are other retail channels from whom people can purchase books, including stores such as Target, Kmart etc. for whom books are a small margin of the overall products they sell therefore they can recover their losses, and let's not forget a multitude of online retailers such as Amazon, Book Depository etc, so it's not difficult to see how a retail chain whose main product offering is the provision of books will find it difficult to survive. 

But books are not the only ones to suffer the same way with the traditional newspaper heading down the same path. People prefer to read their news online, and media companies have come to terms with it. Rupert Murdoch, the media baron, himself commented on how emerging technologies are now the future for the media industry, especially devices such as the iPad, through which customers are willing to pay for their news apps. For more information you can see: Murdoch hails iPad as game changer

But why stop there, with the multitude of media channels available, consumers have already started hearing books (audio books), so why not news as well? News podcasts could be the way to go.