Occasionally, a story comes one way, debunking a commonly held sentiment...
Most people presume that digital media, in this example, the Google Books project, will cause the end of physical books - the dematerialisation of literature. Amazingly, a study was recently released analysing the sales of 37,743 books that Google digitised between 2005 and 2009, and they found the project has increased sales of "paper" books by up to 8%! They found that around 40% of digitised titles saw their sales increase between 2003-2004 and 2010-2011. On the other hand, less than 20% of non-digitised titles had increased sales.
The idea is that digitisation enables marketing & exposure at a scale inaccessible to the brick-and-mortar paradigm.
Let's face it; it has taken 15-20 years to establish the evidence to debunk the sentiment. However, today, businesses face many concerns about the digital world. For example, will AI take my job? Or does my AI consume more carbon than it saves? We're constantly facing asymmetrical risk management decisions, where we know the penalty for a cyber breach today, but we do not know the future value of different options in controls. Hence, this article is a timely reminder. Because the public sentiment on the impact of digital leans one way, there is a real chance future evidence shows the opposite!
Easy to read article about it:
Paper: Abhishek Nagaraj & Imke Reimers in the American Economic Journal