Some weeks ago I wrote that the digital success of the Kate McCann book was evidence that publishers were getting their digital groove on. But at Book Expo America the opposite argument was raised.

According to Evan Schnittman managing director group sales and marketing, print and digital at Bloomsbury Publishing, the book industry has not yet learned the tricks of digital marketing, with e-book sales tracking print book sales.

Speaking at a panel discussion at BEA, Schnittman, according to Publishers Marketplace, argued that what's selling in e-books was what's selling in print, which "is exposing that publishing does not know how to market e-books yet".

I'm not sure why e-book sales should not track print sales more closely and indeed when they do (Amazon's Kindle chart does not reflect the print chart particularly at the moment, though Schnittman will have access to better and deeper data that may give the lie to this superficial analysis), why that won't be considered as a moment of triumph since it would mean that price was not the only factor in what sells digitally. But the view may be different from a US perspective.

What is true is that discoverability is becoming a big issue. According to TeleRead, David Steinberger from the Perseus Books Group said that e was "good for hunters but not for gatherers", with the bottom 50% of titles 2% of print book revenue, but 12% of e-book revenue.

The panel's moderator Google Books executive Tom Turvey questioned why all the book recommendations engines "suck", hinting that Google was working on a better, browsable "front of store" style experience.

Schnittman also took a contrary line on territorial rights arguing that rather than territories being challenged by digital the "exact opposite of what our intuition says is true, and we'll become much more micro-rights oriented" - the argument being that the WWW actually make what's selling where more easiliy enforceable, rather than the more opaque print market. Schnittman did not say that publishers would not want to own global rights, just that what they do with them on a micro level was made easier now.