PV linked to this article, about how Amazon's 70% growth in e-book sales is actually really bad news for the company and e-book sales in general. In fact, as Edward Grant pointed out, once again double-digit growth in e-book sales has magically becomes a reduction!
Got that? SEVENTY PERCENT GROWTH is reason to swig down a bottle of antifreeze. I'm sure Jeff Bezos will get right on that. After all, remember what a 34% growth rate looks like? So sad....
Meanwhile, over at Publishers Weekly, publishers are arguing that a 5% growth rate in the sales of paper books is fantastic!!! (OK, fine, it is actually a nice number for a mature industry.)
Having worked in publishing, I know that many people in it are not great at math. But I would think that even my fellow English majors would realize that there's a HUGE difference between a 70% rate of growth and a 5% rate of growth, that one segment of the market is growing much faster than the other (helpful hint: the one with the bigger number is growing more), and (stay with me here) growth in a market is not a decline.