1. The big publishers will get bigger but the small publishers will continue to proliferate; the share of business controlled by the top few publishers will level off and start to decline within the next three years.

2. The independent bookseller will have much more difficulty surviving than the independent publisher. Independent booksellers will NOT proliferate, except in very niched ways on the Web as infomediaries and as sellers of fiction, literature, and belles lettres.

3. Territorial rights divisions will continue while the big global houses try to avoid them; however, all sides will recognize that all markets are open to all re-sellers which will lead to irritating, and sometimes devious, practices that will be a regular source of frustration to rights holders and will affect the prices paid to certain publishers and for certain kinds of books. Simultaneous global releases will become commonplace and publishers' margins will be shaved by the need for globally-consistent pricing.

4. Decentralized print ("print on demand") and ebooks will change launch and out-of-print practices at all publishers in the next five years. Print on demand will be commonplace in large bookstores in the next five years, perhaps in the next three.

5. Independent bookstores will largely disappear and chain bookstores will largely morph into all-media stores, including selling used books, by 2005. Used books largely require a different business model, because the retailer takes uninsured ownership in them when they're bought, but this effect is obviated by the ability to market a virtual inventory larger than is stocked using new technology.

6. For several years starting about a year from now, the number of titles in English actually available for sale will increase by more than 100,000 per year beyond the new titles published, as technology enables old titles to be made available without major printings.

7. The trend (correctly predicted by this author for this publication at Frankfurt 98) of non-US publishers doing their own publishing and distribution in the US will continue until the only ones not doing it are the very small and those with lists of purely local appeal.

8. Online management of marketing to reading groups will sharply escalate in importance as a consumer marketing tool for publishers and booksellers in the next five years and will be particularly essential to launch genre fiction.

9. Customer-sharing between publishers and intermediaries will become an important sales and systems challenge as everybody strives to perfect direct-selling techniques that capitalize on the opportunities presented by the Internet.

10. Ebooks (or any other read-on-screen experience) will not appeal broadly to consumers in the short run, but they will gain widespread adoption in the professional and educational markets, which will pave the way for consumer adaptation in the second half the coming decade.

11. By 2005, every company with more than 200 employees will have a print-and-bind machine capable of delivering a 300-page one-color bound book in five minutes or less from content delivered on the Internet.

12. Every paradigm-disruptive thing that happens in the book business will have happened to the music business first, with lower requirements of scale.

13. The Millennium will actually begin one year later than everybody is now planning for it. Almost all of these predictions will be blindingly obvious by the time the Millennium really arrives.