While e-publishing has boomed, the physical book market is in no danger of being written off yet, and has, in some cases, actually benefitted from the rise of e-books. 'E-book' - a word sure to strike fear into the hearts of even the most confident and resourceful of book printers. And in some ways their anxiety is not entirely misplaced. The e-book has afterall, fuelled by Amazons expensive and expansive drive to achieve market dominance with its Kindle device, seen phenomenal growth. And so one could be forgiven for imagining that sales of actual, physical books are in some sort of freefall as a result. But this is far from the case. One only has to look at the publishing sensation of the past year - EL James' Fifty Shades trilogy. The first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, started off as a piece of online fan fiction in e-book form, but then bucked the digital-is-king trend to became a major bestseller as a physical book. In the process it kick-started something of a boom in erotic publishing from a host of publishers, as well as tongue-in-cheek spin-offs such as the, ahem, stocking filler Fifty Sheds of Grey which reportedly sold more than 40,000 copies in the run-up to Christmas.
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