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  3. During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the

During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the

admin2014-12-11  41
问题     During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the display tables at the front of bookshops in the run-up to Christmas. It is an impressive display of competitive commercial activity. It is also increasingly pointless.
    More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest e-book retailer, has lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers to the point where people do not fear to take them to the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one-fifth of the largest publishers’ sales are of e-books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper ones. The proportion is growing quickly, especially when many bookshops are closing.
    For readers, this is splendid. Just as Amazon collapsed distance by bringing a huge range of books to out-of-the-way places, it is now collapsing time, by enabling readers to download books instantly. Moreover, anybody can now publish a book, through Amazon and a number of other services. Huge choice and low prices are helping books hold their own on digital devices, even against "Angry Birds".
    For publishers, though, it is a dangerous time. Book publishing resembles the newspaper business in the late 1990s, or music in the early 2000s. Although revenues are fairly stable, and the traditional route is still the only way to launch a blockbuster, the climate is changing. Some of the publishers’ functions — packaging books and promoting them to shops — are becoming obsolete. Algorithms and online recommendations threaten to replace them as arbiters of quality. The tide of self-published books threatens to swamp their products. As bookshops close, they lose a crucial showcase. And they face, as the record companies did, a near-monopoly controlling digital distribution: Amazon’s grip over the e-book market is much like Apple’s control of music downloads.
    Yet there are still two important jobs for publishers. They act as the venture capitalists of the words business, advancing money to authors of worthwhile books that might not be written otherwise.
    And they are editors, picking good books and improving them. So it would be good, not just for their shareholders but also for intellectual life, if they survived.
    They are doing some things right. Having watched the record companies’ impotence after Apple wrested control of music-pricing from them, the publishers have managed to retain their ability to set prices. But they are missing some tricks. The music and film industries have started to bundle electronic with physical versions of their products — by, for instance, providing those who buy a DVD of a movie with a code to download it from the Internet. Publishers, similarly, should bundle e-books with paper books. They also need to become more efficient. Digital books can be distributed globally, but publishers persist in dividing the world into territories with separate editorial staffs. In the digital age it is daft to take months or even years to get a book to market. And if they are to distinguish their wares from self-published dross, they must get better at choosing books, honing ideas and polishing copy. If publishers are to hold readers’ attention they must tell a better story — and edit out all the spelling mistakes as well.
According to the passage, readers welcome e-books because
选项 A、the e-reader is globally available.
B、many traditional bookstores are out of business.
C、they can make a quick response.
D、the e-book service is free from physical constraints.
答案D
解析 推理判断题。根据第三段第二句，“亚马逊缩短了空间距离，在世界上最荒芜的角落也可以阅读大量图书：现在，亚马逊又打破了时间的局限，读者可以快速下载图书”，可以推断出电子图书受读者欢迎是因为电子图书没有时空限制，[D]正确。第二段第二句虽然提到电子阅读器的降价也促进了电子图书的发展，但这与读者喜欢电子图书没有直接的因果关系，排除[A]；[B]“许多传统书店停止营业”是电子图书带来的影响，而不是导致电子图书流行的原因，排除：文章第四段第五句确实提到了对图书的在线推荐，但这也不是读者喜欢电子书的原因，排除[C]。
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