Harper UK ceo Victoria Barnsley gave a speech called Media’s Last Diehard? at the London School of Economics last night. Improbably, though it has taken 10 years for online sales of physical books to comprise 12 percent of sales at HarperCollins, she speculated that “within say 10 years more than half our sales will come from digital downloads.” She acknowledged that territorial rights will be “pretty hard to police” if ebooks become that prevalent and “also said it would be difficult to establish a profitable pricing model when most consumers are used to free digital content.”Bookseller
