Surprise! Internet actually a boon for books

By Gavin Haycock

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - So much for longstanding predictions that the Internet would crush the book publishing industry with digital readers and online sales of used books.

Penguin publishers said this week that the explosion in online and second-hand retailing has not caused the damage they were expecting and that the Internet has in many ways been a boon for booksellers as a tool for marketing, experimentation and reaching out to the next generation of readers.

The publisher, whose authors include former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, novelist Nick Hornby and celebrity cook Jamie Oliver, was rattled by the threat of fast-growing online auction giants like EBay but has discovered that unlike the music industry people still want to own a physical book.

"There is a lot going on in the music publishing industry that is not going on in the book industry. Consumers don't want albums they want tracks and in publishing people want books not chapters," Penguin Chief Executive and Chairman John Makinson told journalists during a briefing earlier this week.

He said that although sales of second-hand books, which appear on online auction sites shortly after release have posed a threat to hardback business as well as subsequent paperback releases, the impact has not been as great as expected.

"The used book market doesn't seem to have made the inroads into the new book market we initially feared," he said.

Makinson cited the example of a U.S. woman who bought a Penguin classics collection of 1,375 titles for $8,000 after her house burnt down. The woman was briefly retained by Penguin to help it research how people grow and manage their collections.

New research and experimenting are industry buzzwords.