“It’s going to be one of the biggest screw-ups in the history of book retail"—An interview with Michael Norris about SIMBA Information's new Trends in Trade Book Retailing report

SIMBA Information’s new Trends in Trade Book Retailing report posits that the decrease in the number of bookstores that we saw in 2011 did not lead to a corresponding growth in ebook sales. This suggests that the showroom effect—where customers discover books at a bricks-and-mortar store and then buy them online—is real, and etailers have a vested interest in the success of physical bookstores.