Earlier that day, KPMG released a survey of 1,037 people which found that only four percent read a digital book in the past month. The books industry will no doubt hope the international launch of Amazon’s Kindle will ignite an interest in book-reader gadgets this Christmas. But both experts and pundits at the Frontline debate agreed: there’s no solid business model in sight for digital editions right now.

Here’s some of what the panelists and the questioning crowd had to say…

—I asked panelist Tom Tivnan, features editor of The Bookseller, how many digital books are being sold: “It’s infinitesimal: last year about 270 million books were sold in the UK and Waterstones, which is really the [digital] market leader sold about 500,000.”

—Panelist James Bridle, who writes the Booktwo blog, is a publisher specialising in digital editions but says the books biz needs to pay more attention to other content industries and on-demand initiatives like Spotify and Hulu: “The book industry has seen this head start from the music industry and other industries—but we haven’t learned enough from it yet… the music and TV industry have learned to get involved in the technology and distribution of these things as well, rather then let other people set the agenda.”

—Audience member Toby, a digital publisher at Random House who didn’t give his second name, said his department was already stretched of resources and pointed out that publishers struggle to get digital editions out in time to coincide with their physical editions: “We’re doing all this extra work and it’s priced at £18.99 for something that you can’t really hold—what’s the business model going to be? How is the industry going to ratify this extra revenue we may or may not be getting?”

—Capgemini media and telecom analyst Barbara Gourley asked whether gadget makers need publishers at all: “What we’ve seen from music industry is that consumers are used to not paying for music but the money spent on music is staying the because the money is going on the device... one could see a scenario where the device manufacturers could be the publishers themselves…”