Desk Hermit: "from personal experience it is very difficult for authors to receive thier royalties from overseas publishers."

For me the blizzard of lobbying from both sides of the the imported books saga has made it dammed near impossible to get any handle on the arguments. Anything you have to say on the subject could only help.

As for books: they seem to growing at roughly an annual compounded rate or around 2.5%. By any measure this means they are thriving. http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm I suspect this may depend on your definition of book though, as electronic book sales are a rapidly growing segment. I vaguely recall Amazon saying making a booking available electronically via its Kindle eBook reader usually increased it sales by 30% or so.

The reason rstuart can't get a handle on the import books debate is that both sides are guessing what the affect might be. Of course if Amazon say Kindle increases your book sales by 30% it must be true?
This may seem an unrelated comment but I saw today that sales of music ipods are decreasing and are expected to decline to zero. Why? This is a product less than a decade old that has sold in the billions. The reason is simple the older ipods only played music, the newer ones access the net, play games and are a phone. The new generation demands a lot for its entertainment. A simple book doesn't cut it anymore.

Desk Hermit: "The reason rstuart can't get a handle on the import books debate is that both sides are guessing what the affect might be."

True. And to do that they quote the effects of similar changes here (eg CD grey importing), and overseas (eg NZ book publishers). The only difficultly is they both, with a straight face, claim opposite effects for the same events. So locally published CD's when up or down, depending on who is speaking. NZ's published authors - ditto. And when I go onto the net to try and distinguish fact from fiction, it seems to be a information free zone. The end result is I don't have a clue what to believe.

Desk Hermit: "Of course if Amazon say Kindle increases your book sales by 30% it must be true?"

Yeah, pretty much. Unlike argument between the publishers, Amazon's sales figures aren't a fact free zone. Quite the reverse. You can find Amazon's figures diced every which way on all sorts of sites. So it is a statement I can put some weight on.

Desk Hermit: "This may seem an unrelated comment but I saw today that sales of music ipods are decreasing and are expected to decline to zero. The reason is simple the older ipods only played music, the newer ones access the net, play games and are a phone."

Yep. Definitely unrelated. For what it is worth, cheaper cameras, PDA's, GPS's and probably eBook readers and going to follow the iPod and join the fax machine, telex, telegraph, wax sealed letter, scrolls and stone tablets in the dust bin of history. But this says anything about the relative amounts of time kids will spend reading books, listening to music, using maps/gps or communicating with each other in writing.