Amazon now sells more ebooks than print books on Amazon.com, while overall US ebook sales were 15.6% of the consumer market in March, up 142% from last year. Meanwhile, for some publishers over half of book sales are now through companies that are not book sellers

Waterstone’s has been bought by a Russian investor for £53m, with James Daunt parachuted in to take it back to its roots in bookselling, while in the USA John Malone has bid for Barnes & Noble valuing it at $1.45bn

As book buying moves away from bookshops and away from print, both retailers and publishers will need to rethink both their scale and the way that they engage with readers. Beautiful shops and beautiful apps are probably an insufficient response

In the March 2011 quarter Apple’s revenue was up 83% year-on-year and net income up 95%. iPhone sales are up 113% and the iPad has sold 19.5m units in the last 12 months. Even the ‘legacy’ Mac business grew 32%, and Apple now has over $65bn cash in the bank. Not bad for a niche business

With single digit penetration in its core growth businesses, Apple has the opportunity to continue growing fast for some time to come

The threat from Google’s Android is real but limited: we expect Android to take a large part of the mid range phone market but that Apple will retain and extend its competitive advantage for tablets and high end phones

VMed’s Q1 results were respectable, helped by strong revenue growth at Virgin Media Business

However, growth in volume, ARPU and OCF, while still positive, is trending downwards, and we retain our expectation of more limited progress in 2011 compared to 2010

VMed’s strategy is coherent; the issue is the pace at which initiatives such as high speed broadband, service convergence and footprint expansion can be converted into cash flow growth

Market data and industry anecdote point to an explosion in ebook sales in the US and UK in 2011. Leading consumer publishers are seeing ebook sales at 10-15% of total sales in January and February, driven by Christmas device sales

So far ebooks had been strongest in niches: romance, business books and frequent travellers. They have now moved into the mass market: few genres will be untouched

This shift brings with it a very different market structure, with Waterstones likely to shrink dramatically, technology companies with little stake in the health of publishing taking major roles and publishers faced with disintermediation and forced to build direct consumer relationships for the first time in their history

Fujitsu UK’s announcement of plans to provide wholesale fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) to five million premises potentially poses a significant threat to BT

However, deployment is contingent on the project attracting at least 60% of the available state funding and significant improvement by Openreach of its terms for Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA)

In addition, ISPs using Fujitsu’s network may find it difficult to attract retail market share from BT based on a high speed broadband proposition. However, should Fujitsu deploy at scale, the project could prove positive for Virgin Media

Some of Ofcom’s proposed wholesale charge controls for Openreach fixed access services sound stringent

However, we estimate that the overall financial impact on BT and other players is likely to be very small

We do not expect the proposals to result in changes to many retail prices, but they should tilt the playing field slightly in favour of BT Retail’s competitors, particularly smaller providers of broadband and business services

European mobile revenue growth improved very slightly in Q4 2010, up by 0.1ppt in reported and 0.2ppts in underlying terms, but remained negative

While the improvement is welcome, growth remains very subdued compared to pre-recession levels, especially in Italy and Spain, which continue to lag the growth of the UK, Germany and France

The outlook for mobile revenue growth is bleak, with severe MTR cuts in Germany and the UK likely to drive growth down again over the next six months

In this short presentation we show our analysis of trends in UK broadband and telephony to December 2010, based on the published results of the major service providers. We include our own estimates where reported data is incomplete. This quarter’s edition includes a look at Ofcom’s recent research into broadband speeds and its response to the Advertising Standards Authority’s review of broadband advertising.

Last week Apple introduced a new subscription payment system for publishers using its devices, but also clamped down on publishers using their own payment systems, obliging them to offer Apple’s system (with a 30% commission) in parallel or leave the platform

For publishers selling their own content with no marginal cost, this is an extra cost that most will grudgingly accept. But aggregators obliged to pay rights-holders a fixed fee for each content sale, such as music or ebook vendors, face bigger problems: some will be forced off the platform

Apple is trying to strengthen its ecosystem, increasing the range and user-friendliness of apps and locking users in with content only usable on its devices. Yet it risks pushing some popular services off its platform entirely, increasing the appeal of the newly launched Android devices

VMed’s Q4 results were strong financially, although this was partly due to an exceptionally sharp drop in capex; cable volume growth continued to weaken in the face of strong competition from BT Retail and BSkyB

VMed’s results for the past seven quarters have benefited heavily from price increases, which are unlikely to have as great an impact in 2011

Management is developing a range of strong initiatives, including TiVo, 30 and 100 Mbit/s broadband, and fixed-mobile service convergence, but the financial benefits are likely to be felt in 2012 and beyond rather than in 2011. A revamped Virgin Media Business should have a more immediate impact, but we expect group performance in 2011 to be more modest