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

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

The New York Times is shortly to switch its free desktop and app services into a part-free and part-paid metered system. We also expect the UK Times to switch from its subscription ‘Berlin wall’ to a similar system

In the UK, quality newspaper circulation is moving into freefall, as smartphone and tablet devices provide target consumers with 24/7 news coverage on the sofa and on the move

Paid apps are in the pipeline for the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail, and for some Trinity Mirror local and regional sites, as publishers enter a new era of digital innovation

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

The concept of demerging Sky News is evidently a plausible one and we consider it very unlikely that critics of the deal will have much success undermining its appropriateness as a protection of plurality

However, it is harder to judge whether the proposed implementation secures the channel’s independence as fully and clearly as it might

We outline a series of issues that the information supplied for the public consultation does not appear to deal with. We note, in particular, that the proposed undertakings seem not to block Rupert Murdoch, or members of his family, from buying the 60.9% of the shares in Sky News not to be held by News Corp

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

With the Daily, Rupert Murdoch has launched an iPad-only mass market ‘newspaper’ with a fifth of the journalists and just 15% of the revenue per reader of a conventional popular newspaper. Whether it succeeds or not, this sort of radicalism may be essential if the spirit of newspapers is to survive

The Daily is using every tool Apple and the social web can give it to drive adoption, but for all the video and twitter feeds it remains at heart a print product on a tablet. The first truly native iPad news voice has yet to come

The Daily and its peers are discovering that a platform owner such as Apple has power the print unions never dreamed of, with the payment models they want conflicting with bigger strategic objectives at technology companies ten times their size

Jeremy Hunt announced on 25 January his intention to refer News Corp’s bid for BSkyB to the Competition Commission

However, he is first providing News Corp with the opportunity to address Ofcom’s concerns, and in so doing protecting his department and Ofcom from any legal threats

If Ofcom or the OFT say the News Corp remedies don’t go far enough, Jeremy Hunt will be then almost obliged to refer the transaction to the CC

Smartphones are rapidly moving to become a majority of UK mobile handset sales, driving a surge in mobile internet use. Even if usage per user (currently growing) flattens out, we forecast mobile internet usage to grow from 1.8bn hours in 2010 to 7bn in 2015: 28% of total online time

This should drive the long promised growth in mobile advertising and we project UK spend, including search and display, will rise to £420 million by 2015, equivalent to 10% of PC internet search/display advertising

We expect the majority of this usage to be incremental to PC-based consumption, as users find new things to do and buy on the mobile web, driving the overall online advertising market to further growth