The Flattening of Ebook Sales

As the person who produced the AAP report quoted here, I'm not given enough characters in Comments to point out the countless errors in this piece. It misunderstands our basic data and, since our reports only track current vs previous year, quotes figures that come out of nowhere and are unrecognizable. It misses the widely-reported fact that Q1 2013's overall eBook growth slowed because of the Children's/Young Adults category: The Q1 lead-up to the Hunger Games film in March 2012 drove C/YA eBooks to extraordinary triple-digit growth; minus a comparable blockbuster in Q1 2013, C/YA slowed. Adult Fiction/Non-Fiction eBooks, however, grew 14% in the same time '12-'13 period.

Also, an essential point is missed: These are not retail sales numbers but, instead, publishers' net revenues coming from all their distribution channels including Institutions (e.g. schools, libraries) and Book Fairs. That also means, for instance, that with Borders' financial troubles no longer a factor, publishers have seen their net revenue from print stabilize which, in turn, affects their overall percentage earned from eBooks in these reports.

Finally, the piece's premise that an eBook is an eBook is an eBook is wrong. Each category within consumer books - Adult Fiction/Non-Fiction, Children's/YA and Religious Presses - has moved into e-formats at different points in time. Adult F/NF was the pioneer, starting years ago, and that growth has become more consistent as it's matured. C/YA, which entered later, is now in the midst of enormous transition. Religious Presses are more newcomers to eBooks. Lumping these distinct categories together and making broad generalizations makes little sense.

We release highlights of all our reports to media (including the Post). We're happy to share. But an article based on a non-journalistic blog that itself has only second-hand information does a disservice to readers, authors and publishers.

Andi Sporkin Association of American Publishers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/08/e...

I think a lot of factors are influencing this trend, but I don't buy that DRM is the problem. As rude as it may sound, I doubt most of the general public even knows what DRM is. Well, the data itself shows that the majority of consumer book sales are going to paper, so that argument may be moot anyway.

Newer generations probably won't purchase nearly as many paper books (or digital, even) as older generations. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. The market will probably shrink and be taken over by short-form work designed for tablets and e-readers.

2. Habits are hard to change. What you are most accustomed to when growing up, you tend to continue unless the advantages of change is overwhelming. Current e-book formats do not yet offer huge advantages over paper books, thus many adults keep buying paper ones. (Some advantages, like physical storage space & weight, are big, but confined to specific situations, say during travel, as mentioned in the article.)

3. New generations of kids are more and more distracted by digital interactivity and communications. I suspect the average amount of long-form reading per person in the developed world has declined over time. (Does anyone have an estimate?) Long-form narratives like paper books and current e-books cannot now hold attention of most casual readers, especially the young. Even though I did not grow up with a computer and read many books as a child, I now read quite a bit less books and many more short items on the Web (articles, blogs, forum posts, etc.).

4. Over time, when the new generation of digital natives grows up and technology progresses, e-books would gradually but surely dominate the reading market for all types of books. More importantly, popular non-fictions will be developed as a new kind of e-books, which cannot even be fully presented in the traditional narrative form. Al Gore's Our Choice [1] is just an example of the first generation's interactive e-books.

[1] http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/

And i still buy physical books, too.

When purchasing an ebook reader is as trivial as buying a pocket calculator...then you'll see a massive shift in the proportion of ebook sales vs print sales. (Also, it would be enormously helpful if ebooks could be purchased WITHOUT a credit card...afterall kids buy books too.)

I would also like to throw in DRM & proprietary formats. First, you are using something like a Kindle you are licensing content. If Amazon goes away, I wouldn't be surprised if your content does too. That would make me nervous if I was heavily invested in some ecosystem.

But another interesting theory, not mentioned in the article, is that there may be a difference in reading speed and comprehension between paper and screens (although I have seen conflicting data on this).

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=reading-pap...

One fascinating idea from this article is that "As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit."

Personally, I comprehend information much better when its in some format like PDF which is not re-flowable. But most books these days, available from Amazon or Apple, do not meet that description.

Maybe I'm an odd one, but my ideal reading device would probably be some 13" tablet that could display a whole PDF page at a time.

I didn't understand this part. Why would tablets usage reduce e-books sales if you can read e-books on your tablet all the same? If the author means the DRM issue, then it's not really the case, since there are many DRM free e-books sold already, and even with DRMed ones, DRM can be removed in most cases in order to access them on any device you want.

Large media producers of all stripes are notorious for conflating their sales with all sales. That makes for a particularly egregious practice here, where indies may account for 30-40% or more of sales.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1sjRD7NSec#t=3m57s

So ebooks only growing at 5% with 25% market share surprises me. At that rate it will take ebooks 10 years to draw even with print:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Solve%5B0.25+*+1.05%5En...

This held steady until around November of last year, and then suddenly declined. Today print sales are nearly 2x that of the Kindle sales.

The important data point is that the Amazon sales ranks of both have remained steady.