Sonny Mehta Quotes

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.

Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.

I think when I first sold digital comics it was sort of on a whim.

More and more people are opening online stores and online retail businesses. This market is expanding very, very quickly.

Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.

The internet has been incredible in regards to the selling of my CD. I don't know how it's affected or will affect my acting career.

The digital revolution has disrupted most traditional media: newspapers, magazines, books, record companies, radio.

What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that.

When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn't even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.

It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

All the big online retailers are looking at how to enter the Russian market.

I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.

Within Internet users, you have a big chunk of people who can convert to online shopping.

The power of digital distribution over physical retail outlets is you have a chance to create a global audience.

I would think that most of the online business will be conducted by traditional retailers and that over 90 per cent of the e-retailers will, in fact, all go out of business.

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.

There certainly was a lot of potential in the air for doing a magazine which focused on the way business, in particular, was being transformed by the Internet.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.

Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.