Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Friday called the worldwide availability of Amazon's e-book reader The Kindle a fantastic development, but said it still expects sales of hard copy books to prove more popular.
"It's an absolutely fantastic development for the book trade and it's something for all of us British publishers to look forward to," Chief Executive Nigel Newton told Dow Jones Newswires Friday.
Until now, The Kindle had only been available to customers in the U.S. but earlier this month Amazon announced it will make the product available to buy worldwide and international shipping begins on Monday.
Newton doesn't view The Kindle as a threat to hard-copy book sales."It's an additional channel of sales for us. If you look at the downloads of Dan Brown's most recent novel to The Kindle, that gives you an idea of the size of the market that exists. In the future, everything will be available to download but in my view printed books will remain the dominant way that people will read," he said.
However, he thinks consumers will have a natural preference of either continuing to buy books or ditching hard-copy titles for The Kindle.
"There's no question that people will buy just one or the other. But the important thing for us is that we should benefit either way," he said.
Dan Brown's novel "The Lost Symbol" has topped the Kindle e-books chart for four weeks and sold more than 1,000 digital copies on its first day of release.
Newton said:"The Kindle is great for people that read on buses, the tube, planes and take books on holiday with them. It's so much more convenient to take a device of that size rather than piles of books."
He said talks with Amazon about which of its titles would be made available on the e-reader were at an early stage and he doesn't yet know at what prices titles will be sold for.
"The business model is still emerging but the important thing for us will be to have the margin as similar as possible to what we have in books," he said.
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