There is much in the press today about how in the US e-book sales have overtaken paperback sales. Sales of e-books trebled to $90m, exceeding adult paperback sales of $81m. It's certainly a milestone, and one that can only throw further doubt on the future of high street booksellers.

Martin Latham, manager of Waterstone's Canterbury, writing in this week's Bookseller, argues that it is not in fact e-books that are kicking bookshops but what he describes as "delayed paperbacks".

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Latham writes:

Customers have interrogated me for 25 years about why, when they want to buy a product, its publisher will not sell it at a man-in-the-street price until many months later. When I explain that the actual date is unknown, and depends on how long the publisher can milk a dwindling minority for the hardback price, well, the customer backs away with an expression that says "get me out of here and back to a normal retailer" or even, "when your planet exploded, how many of you survived?" Now that the book can be downloaded on publication day, this Dance-of-the-Seven-Veils journey to paperback seems even madder.

E-reader buyers are mostly older people fed up with holding up that new Clive Cussler hardback in bed, or, at holiday-time, paying EasyJet a fortune in baggage allowance. Ironically, hardbacks, or rather, delayed paperbacks, are helping to kill bookshops.