The world's book trade meets in Frankfurt next week on the brink of a long-feared transformation of the industry for which few are well prepared.

Electronic reading devices like Amazon's Kindle are set to enter the mass market, starting with a surge in sales this Christmas holiday season, helped by lower prices, rising consumer confidence and better distribution outside the United States.

Like the music and newspaper industries before it, the book-publishing world now faces vanishing revenues as sales of physical discs, papers and books give way to far cheaper or free digital distribution.

"Meantime, publishers are distracting themselves by fretting over the price of eBooks, withholding eBook releases so as not to cannibalize hardcover book sales, and watching helplessly as their businesses erode in front of them," analyst Sarah Rotman Epps of technology research firm Forrester wrote this week.

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