It's the end of books as you knew them: E-books out-sell hardbound for the 1st time
Summary: Get ready to bid adieu to your local bookstore -- if you're lucky enough to still have one! -- as e-books sales surpass hardcover book sales for the first time.
EBooks out sell hardbound for the first time.
If you follow the book trade, you knew this was coming. E-books, no matter whether you read them on an Amazon Kindle, a Barnes & Noble Nook, or your iPad are selling like crazy. We may complain about their high prices and even take eBook publishers to court for their prices and hardware lock-in, but we love our e-books. In fact, we love them so much that for the first time adult eBook sales were higher than adult hardcover sales.
It wasn't even close. The Association of American Publishers reported that in the first quarter of 2012, adult eBook sales were up to $282.3 million while adult hardcover sales came to only $229.6 million. In last year's first quarter, hardcover sales accounted for $223 million in sales while eBooks logged $220.4 million.
So where are the eBook buyers coming from? The answer is trade and mass-market paperbacks. Trade paperback sales fell from $335-million to $299.8-million. That's a drop of 10.5%. Mass market paperbacks sales had it even worse. They plummeted $124.8-million to $98.9-million in the same quarter last year. That's a fall of 20.8%.
The conventional wisdom had been that e-books would eat up hardbound book sales. That's not happening. Instead, while e-books will certainly by year's end be the most popular book format, it's paperback books that are really taking a hit. Perhaps that's because when you're buying a hardcover, you're buying not just a story, but an artifact, an object with more value than just as a way to get to the story.
Be that as it may, e-books are clearly the wave of the future. As someone who loves bookstores, libraries and has a few thousand physical books of his own, this is one wave I'm not entirely happy about. After all, e-books can be deleted, locked away by Digital Rights Management (DRM), or even edited from afar.
Don't get me wrong. I love the ease of purchase and use of e-books. My Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet goes everywhere with me and I have e-book applications on every device I own. Let's not forget though, as we rush to e-books faster than a bored housewife running to buy her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey--the soft-porn novel which has accounted for over 50% of all trade paperback book sales in recent weeks—that we're also going to lose such simple pleasures as lending a friend a good book.
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Talkback
How I hate this.
Perhaps you like the adult bookstores...
I can see this... Most people don't like going to an adult bookstore... Sometimes you find creepy customers stalking the aisles, sometimes the creeps are the adult bookstore employees... Some people get embarassed or are inhibited... But I can see reasons for both preferences... I'm sure that some of it has to do with the demographics of your local adult bookstore... ;P
It's progress, but publishers are slow
Still, it's progress. While I used to love going to bookstores, I've soured on the entire retail experience in recent years. I would like to see some sort of app that makes browsing a more enjoyable experience (bookstores in particular, but other markets could benefit).
Older books
Not even close?
Let's take a bigger overall look:
-- 2011 Q1: total sales $903.2 million; e-books $220.4 million, or 24.40% of the total; non-e-books $682.8 million, or 75.60% of the total
-- 2012 Q1: total sales $910.6 million; e-books $282.3 million, or 31.00% of the total; non-e-books $628.3 million, or 69.00% of the total
-- Net change in total sales: increase of +0.82% from 2011 Q1 to 2012 Q2
However, I find a couple of things somewhat misleading about the statistics as they're presented:
1. E-books was presented as a single category, while paper-sourced books were broken down into separate categories. The problem is that, in many cases, you will find the same book available in both hardcover & paperback editions. Since we're primarily looking at paper vs. e-book, breaking down the paper books muddies the water... solely in the favor of e-books. However, as I pointed out, pooling all of the paper-sourced books into a single category shows that e-books only increased their percentage of total sales by just under 7% for the year... far from a "we're taking the world by storm" change, particularly since paper still shows a solid majority percentage for sales.
2. Straight dollar sales can be misleading when the unit prices even within a single category aren't identical. It's the same problem you see when looking at how successful movies are at the box office: it's easy to break a few million dollars when a movie ticket can cost $8 or more dollars apiece (if not more in certain markets), but it makes it hard to compare to movies of "yesteryear", back when tickest were half the cost or cheaper (try finding a movie that broke $300 million at the box office when tickets were $0.50 apiece). Unit sales, on the other hand, can provide a better picture. For example, let's consider books A (hardcover, $25), B (e-book, $20), and C (paperback, $8). Book A's total sales were $25 million, meaning it sold 1 million units. Book B's total sales were $30 million, so it sold 1.5 million units. Book C's total sales were only $18 million... but it sold 2.25 million units. Book B sold 50% more units than Book A,... but Book C sold 50% more units than Book B (and nearly twice as many units as Book A).
3. Related to #1, there were no meaningful categories actually listed. What do I mean by that? I see nothing about any breakdown of, say, diet books or other reference books sold as e-books vs. hardcover. Nothing about science-fiction novels sold as paperback vs. hardcover vs. e-book edition. For me, I buy very few reference-style or nonfiction books, so whether or not e-book sales of nonfiction items is spiking or not makes no difference [b]to me personally[/b]. On the other hand, the breakdown of sales of fiction novels, particularly in categories that are of interest to me, would be much more significant. Without that breakdown, this discussion just starts sounding like one of those "post-PC" arguments... & we all know how those end up degenerating into flamebaits & fanboi diatribes.
I think an in depth breakdown
I read both ebooks and print books and while I do enjoy the convenience of having several books on a device that is easy to carry I also enjoy the feel of a print book and will still buy them.
Same here
And yes, despite being a geek that loves learning about/using new tech toys, I still love the feel of a real book as well. Not to mention that the only limitation on reading time is what time I have available, as opposed to when the last time was that I recharged the e-reader...
Re: Item Number Two
That was exactly my point.
Hmmm, unfortunately the work firewall won't let me view the site right now. I'll have to check it out later. Would be interesting to see how some modern "blockbusters" compare to "classics" of yesteryear...
$ vs. units
Hard cover books have to support a lot more overhead: paper. printing, warehousing, and logistics. The problem is a lot of publishers don't want their revenue to drop, even if they will be more profitable in the long run. New, ebook-only publishers are springing up like weeds now, and the old guard are going to fall like dinosaurs if they can't shed this overhead fast enough.
E-books are also enjoying some of that new media effect that compels people to buy things they already own. Just as Pink Floyd rang the register when LPs gave way to CDs which gave way to MP3s; I'm slowing replacing some of my physical books with electronic ones when I see them available and if the price is right. Eventually I'll do what I did with LPs and dump the whole lot of them -- 1500 books takes up a ton of space and I have to move soon. Well, probably donate rather than dump, but the effect is the same.
We've done that with VHS, so far
With books, though, I'll probably always have books on my shelves, which makes it harder sometimes to justify the idea of buying the e-book version when I already have it in paper.
E-books are here to stay but don't mean the 'end' of anything
They also don't have access to print books
Things are not going to get better. The paper industry is already struggling because of low demand and have increased their prices to stay viable. The carbon footprint of bringing a book or magazine to your mall or doorstep is rather staggering (Discover magazine had a big article about this a few years ago), so the pressure to be more "green" will weigh heavily on the market as well.
I was a reluctant convert...as I mentioned above, I have more than 1500 physical books in my personal library. For the most part though, an ebook adds more than it takes away. For starters, it always lays flat...and yes, there are many times I prefer to read hands-free. They take no room to store, they don't get dusty, they don't suffer from environmental hazards (the reader might, but not the media) and they are available wherever I go on whatever device is handy (phone, Kindle, PC).
Things they aren't good at include leafing through the pages browsing at pictures. I suppose this would be better on a tablet than on a smaller device. I imagine some day the coffee table book will be replaced by a coffee table's built-in display (with 42" LCD TVs selling for under $400, can this be far away?)
books
No real baseline for comparison.
And then there's the greatest deal of all: free. I constantly have books checked out from the library, and have almost 60 requests in the queue. Using the library website and email, I can request books from any of the 45 branches to be delivered to my local branch down the street, and borrow books via inter-library load from neighboring cities and the state university libraries. I already pay taxes to support the system, I'm darn well going to use it.
Errrr.....
I've never bought an eBook and have bought two digital albums - but both are the [official] audio to concerts I went to.
I like eBooks, and have purchased five or six just recently.
Hardbound Books
Ebooks
. . . and I feel fine.
. . . and I feel fine.
Sorry, just had to.
I'm sorta split. I'm thinking that for regular reading, I'm likely to go to e-books. But for reference material for my job, I'll stick to paperback. It's easier to find stuff in a reference book if it's physical.