The Big Picture - My Findings

It's inevitable that the high street retailer will have to change significantly, and soon. The recession has already provided online retailers with a strong advantage over high street stores, suppressing the latter at a time when investment in e-publishing should have been a priority - the advent of the smartphone and tablet in particular has encouraged consumers to focus on convenience over the browsing experience, and even the browsing experience of the bookstore is being used by customers intending to make the actual purchase online.

Following this, designing books will fundamentally change as the means of marketing them has done - Fifty Shades of Grey came about principally through the support of online communities, and the funding website Kickstarter has proven that pitching to the potential consumer can be a viable alternative to pitching to a publisher. A product's initial appeal can extend far beyond critics and relying on it to look pretty on the shelf, and the traditional publisher is no longer the only means in which a product can come about.

In short, the more options and alternatives provided by technology, the more the traditional book publishing and retailing sectors become obsolete. Entire segments of the industry are finding they have to justify their existence, and the technology threatening them is something they have to embrace - basically, they can't beat 'em, so they must join 'em.