Book Wars. John B. Thompson

Association of American Publishers

If we then look at print books and ebooks as percentages of total sales (table 1.4 and figure 1.4), we can see that ebooks level off at 23–24% in 2012, 2013 and 2014 and then begin to decline, falling to around 15% in 2017 and 2018. Print books, on the other hand, continue to account for the lion’s share of sales, falling to around 75% of total sales in 2012, 2013 and 2014 but then rebounding, rising to between 80 and 85% from 2015 to 2018.

Table 1.4 Print books and ebooks as percentages of total US trade sales

	Print books	Ebooks
2008	98.9	1.1
2009	97.1	2.9
2010	92.4	7.6
2011	82.7	17.3
2012	76.8	23.2
2013	76.6	23.4
2014	75.9	24.1
2015	79.3	20.7
2016	83.2	16.8
2017	84.3	15.7
2018	85.3	14.7
Source: Association of American Publishers

Figure 1.4 Print books and ebooks as percentages of total US trade sales

      Source: Association of American Publishers

And if we then extract the ebook percentages and reformat the vertical scale of this graph (figure 1.5), we can see that the growth of ebooks during this period displays the pattern of the classic technology S-curve: adoption is slow at the beginning, it then takes off and grows rapidly when there is a breakthrough of some kind, and then levels off when the market has been saturated or the limits of performance have been reached. In some cases, the S-curve may decline after this point as the technology no longer improves, alternative technologies appear that steal market share, novelty fades or demand wanes for other reasons. In the case of ebooks, the take-off occurred in 2008–9, following the introduction of the Kindle, and sales rose steeply until 2012 when they levelled off and then fell back.

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

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	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