Perhaps this has escaped your notice? 2010 was the year of digital. More precisely, it was the year of the e-book — although in our market, it is still only in its infancy.

After a period of suspense driven by the nervous curiosity of publishing professionals, print and digital books are finally beginning to coexist. But could the latter overtake the former and ultimately bury it for good? Nothing is less certain…

Amazon and its Kindle, Sony, Apple and soon Google claim to offer technology powerful enough to persuade readers to abandon the old printed book. A few figures help illustrate the exceptional enthusiasm: in the United States, e-books have accounted for 8% to 10% of the market for three to four years, whereas in our region they still stood at around 1% until the beginning of 2010.

The Kindle, a kind of standard-bearer for the digital format in the United States, sold more than 8 million units in 2010. Amazon is cutting out the traditional author/publisher/bookseller chain, replacing it with a lean, just-in-time market logic. Criticism is mounting: Amazon and Google want to deal directly with authors, promising them margins that publishers cannot match.

At the start of last year, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, caused a shockwave by proposing to guarantee authors 70% of a book’s sale price. Designed to outbid Google and Apple and to entice future beneficiaries, the move is above all a «coup de massue» for publishers…

Digital books also have the advantage of being quickly accessible to readers. They can bring together the content of several thousand works on a single tablet, be downloaded instantly and sold at a sharply reduced price: almost 50% below bookstore prices, thereby bypassing the traditional distribution system. Faced with this prospect, booksellers and publishers are being pushed to the margins — or forced to adapt and open up to this market.

For example, the Office du livre (OLF), Switzerland’s largest book distributor, launched the e-readers.ch website in 2010. Offering 30,000 references to date and working with Swiss and French publishing houses, it claims to support the diversity of literary forms while anticipating a possible decline in bookstores. Thus, by selecting the digital book of their choice from the titles on offer, each internet user directs, through their purchase, a 25% commission on the sale price to the bookstore nearest to their home.

Yet uncertainty remains for publishing professionals, even if attachment to the printed book is not about to fade. In the face of digital giants, preserving the print format or adapting the Swiss market to electronic publishing are stimulating challenges — but far from won. The survival of bookstores and publishers is at stake.

Reading is a matter of passion. A desire to tell stories, especially to the very young, whom one can hardly imagine being as enchanted by a digital tablet as by a real book filled with pictures; a desire to fold the top corners of pages to find them again later, or to crease them; a desire too to arrange them on a bookshelf… Perhaps everything will depend on a love of books. By books, I mean real ones, the kind that sometimes fill a bedroom or living room with the faint smell of aged paper… For, as Henry Miller wrote, «they were alive and they spoke to me »…

Faustin Rollinat/Editor at Le Monde Economique