target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_f5aa78e6-66c2-5e25-9aab-c4fa1d161dda">Figure 1.5 Ebooks as percentage of total US trade sales, 2008–2018
Source: Association of American Publishers
Of course, this does not mean that ebook sales in US trade publishing will remain at around 15 per cent in the future, or will continue to decline, or will never rise above this level – we simply don’t know what will happen in the future. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the dramatic growth that followed the introduction of the Kindle in November 2007 was short-lived, and it came to an abrupt halt in 2012. While the future is unpredictable, it would be a bold soul who, knowing what we now know, suggested that mainstream trade publishers were likely to experience a strong resurgence of ebook sales in the near future – the numbers could fluctuate from year to year, affected by various factors, but, given the evidence to date, a strong and sustained resurgence seems unlikely.
The differentiated pattern of ebook sales: delving beneath the surface
The issues are more complicated than they appear at first sight, however. While the S-curve gives a neat picture of the overall trend, it is misleading because it collapses all the different kinds of books into one average number. We shouldn’t assume that different kinds of books perform in the same way – they don’t. The extent to which books have migrated from print to digital formats has varied enormously from one kind of book to another. We can see this by looking at some sales data from a large US trade publisher that I’ll call ‘Olympic’. Table 1.5 and figures 1.6a and 1.6b give a breakdown of ebook sales as a percentage of total sales at Olympic from 2006 to 2016. All data are based on net units and net sales – that is, sales net of any returns. We should not assume that these data are representative of the industry as a whole, or that the experiences of all trade publishers will have been identical to this one – the data from each publishing house will be unique and will reflect to some extent the specific titles they’ve published. But Olympic is a mainstream trade publisher with a large and varied list, and the occasional truly exceptional title has been stripped out of the data to minimize the distorting effect of outliers. So while the experiences of each publisher will be unique, it is unlikely that the sales patterns of other major trade houses will differ radically from the patterns experienced by Olympic.
Table 1.5 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars
| Ebooks units | Ebooks $ | |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
| 2007 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
| 2008 | 0.5 | 0.5 |
| 2009 | 1.9 | 2.6 |
| 2010 | 6.2 | 8.6 |
| 2011 | 16.4 | 19.5 |
| 2012 | 22.2 | 25.9 |
| 2013 | 20.7 | 23.8 |
| 2014 | 19.8 | 23.7 |
| 2015 | 19.7 | 22.6 |
| 2016 | 16.4 | 17.1 |
Figure 1.6a Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars
Figure 1.6b Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars
There is another important qualification to make about these data: they are for the period 2006–16 only and we cannot extrapolate, on the basis of these data, to the sales patterns for 2017 and subsequent years. Future patterns could change. I’ll return to this issue below. But, for now, let’s focus on what actually happened in the crucial decade from 2006 to 2016.
Table 1.5 and figure 1.6a show all ebooks as a percentage of Olympic’s total sales by both units and revenue. We see that Olympic’s ebook sales were negligible in 2006 and 2007 but they began to grow rapidly from 2008 on, reaching a peak in 2012, when ebook sales accounted for just under 26% of Olympic’s total revenue. From that point on, ebook sales began to decline as a proportion of total sales, falling to below 23% in 2015 and then down to 17% in 2016. The pattern is very similar for both units and revenue, as one would expect. The levelling off in ebook sales is more vividly displayed when we change the scale of the y-axis on the graph, as in figure 1.6b: here, again, we see that the pattern of ebook sales at Olympic displays the classic technology S-curve.
However, looking at all ebooks as a percentage of total sales gives us a very partial view of what has happened because it masks the variations between different categories of books. In the early 2000s, before ebooks began to take off, many commentators assumed that when the ebook revolution began, it would be driven primarily by businessmen who wanted to carry business books with them on their business trips, reading at airports and on planes: it was adult nonfiction, and especially business books and ‘big idea’ books, that would, they thought, spearhead the ebook revolution. Were they right? Is that what actually happened?
Table 1.6 and figure 1.7 break down ebooks into three broad categories: adult fiction, adult nonfiction and juvenile (where juvenile includes all children’s books as well as young adult). The figure shows ebooks as a percentage of Olympic’s total sales, by both revenue and units, in each of these broad categories. (As with figure 1.6b, the y-axis has been adjusted to display the S-curve.) It is immediately clear that the category where the biggest change has occurred is not nonfiction but, rather, adult fiction: in terms of revenue, ebooks as a percentage of total revenue in adult fiction increased from 1.0% in 2008 to 43.4% in 2014, before falling back to 37.4% in 2015 and then rebounding slightly to 38.9% in 2016. This contrasts sharply with adult nonfiction, where ebooks as a percentage of total revenue rose from 0.4% in 2008 to 16.6% in 2015, before falling back to 13.2% in 2016 – remaining well below 20% throughout this period. Juvenile lagged even further behind: here ebooks as a percentage of total revenue increased from 0.1% in 2008 to 12.2% in 2014, before falling back to 7.4% in 2015 and 6% in 2016.5 Each
