Fulmar chief executive Mike Taylor represented print on the panel, which also included Cond Nast managing director Nicholas Coleridge, Profile Books managing director Andrew Franklin and John Bates, adjunct professor at the London Business School. The BBC's Peter Day was chair.

Coleridge kicked off the event, staged by the Trade & Industry Forum of the Stationers' Company, by saying that now was "a rather good time to be in magazines. For consumers it has been a very strong four years and on the whole we were not hit by any stark downturn in advertising."

He said the that UK had the largest appetite for magazines of anywhere in the world, and advertising prices in magazines had remained competitive.

Books too have been robust, said Taylor, who moved into paperback production in 2000. The market had been boosted by new sales channels, such as  the internet and supermarkets, and by TV book club endorsements.

But Profile's Franklin expressed concern that "fewer and fewer books are selling more and more copies".
"The gap between the huge winners and the depressing morass of big losers is growing," he said.

Bates concluded that while print was "a great medium", entrepreneurs of the future would "work in some hybrid form that will combine offline and online media".

Meanwhile, William Alden of Alden Group is to hand over the reins as chairman of the Trade & Industry Forum to Cambridge University Press chairman Stephen Bourne.

Story by Lauretta Roberts