Received the following question from librarian Ned Heeger-Brehm:
I follow your blog with great interest and I particularly appreciate the sales information you pass along. For my own clarification, when the Association of American Publishers report that “Ebook sales up 176.6% in 2009” does that include eaudibooks or just ebooks? I’ve wondered the same thing about the IDPF statistics reported at www.openbook.org.
Audiobook sales are reported separately.
For example, see http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm where we find that wbooks were up 176.6% to $313 million, while audio books were down 12.9% to $192 million.
2009 was the first year in which ebook sales were more than audiobook sales.
Do you think that they are including downloadable audiobooks in their definition of audiobooks, or are they including downloadable audiobooks in their definition of ebooks?
Why wouldn’t they include audiobook downloads, like Audible and Overdrive in the numbers? Pbook, eBook, Audiobook are all pretty specific categories I would think.
I suppose the only way to be 100% sure is to ask them directly, but I can’t imagine why audiobook downloads wouldn’t be included with audiobook CD’s and MP3 CD’s.
I’m almost 100% certain that audiobooks are NOT included in the eBook statistics. eBooks are read. Audiobooks are listened to. With text-to-speech, the lines may blur.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com