online retail sales are rapidly increasing in the UK

"ONLINE retail is growing six times faster than high street sales and is forecast to hit £37 billion a year by 2014, according to a retail survey. The rapid expansion is hitting high street retailers who are struggling to remain competitive with 40,000 shops closing over the past decade."

Those are the opening lines of this article. However, the mention of 40,000 shops closing over the last decade suggests that high street sales are growing very little if at all, so statistics can be misleading.
 
"The Webloyalty Online Retail Report by Verdict Research predicts that current Internet spending will grow by £14bn from 2010 to 2014. Many more familiar brands will disappear from town centres as a growing number of retailers close shops and trade solely on websites, according to the research."

Undoubtedly the volume of books sold online will steadily increase, although most of the customers for our books are 60 plus and the percentage of that group who like shopping online is small.  And the percentage of sales made to online surfers is also small; for example, we estimate that only about 1 person in 1,000 who visits this blog goes on to buy one of our books.