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E-book sales revenue and number of books sold up, publishing market size down
July 18, 2012 | 11:37 pm
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By Chris Meadows
GalleyCat and AppNewser have a pair of articles discussing some sales figures from a recent BookStats report. GalleyCat notes that adult fiction e-book sales accounted for 30% of net publisher sales in 2011—up from 13% in 2010. Net sales revenue from e-books more than doubled, from $869 million in 2010 to $2.074 billion in 2011, and now accounts for 15% of all surveyed publishers’ net revenues.
AppNewser reports from the same survey that the monetary size of the publishing market as a whole declined by 2.5% from $27.9 billion in 2010 to $27.2 billion in 2011—but overall units went up by 3.4% from 2.68 billion to 2.77 billion. I wonder if that’s due to publishers taking less revenue from agency priced e-books?
Regardless, it’s kind of neat to look at how quickly e-book sales are increasing and consider that only about six years ago we were wondering if the e-book market would ever actually happen. Now look at it!
It’s fashionable now to paint Amazon as an evil monopolistic bad guy, but where would we be without it? After twelve years of just sitting there smoldering, the e-book market only truly caught fire when Amazon added some fuel and a breath of fresh air. (“Kindle” is right!) Even Sony, one of the biggest corporations in the world, wasn’t able to jump-start the e-book market, try as it might.
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Comments:
Amazon and the Kindle were in the right place at the right time, and Amazon is now the leader in eBook retailing.
If Amazon had never existed, however, someone else would now be the industry retail leader; but in my opinion the ebook market would be more or less the same size as it is now.
I started buying and reading eBooks when Baen Books started to sell them in 1999, and I have watched the market grow ever since.
One of the things I can remember is that Amazon and Barnes & Noble both took an early stab at the eBook market that went _nowhere_. That is, they both released a number of free, public domain books circa 2001, in an attempt to jump start the eBook market. I downloaded these eBooks and I still have a lot of them. When this attempt to get the market moving failed, both retailers dropped out of the eBook business for several years.
In those days, I was reading eBooks (in Microsoft Reader format) on a Pocket PC that I bought specifically for that purpose. I was also wondering if I should buy a Rocket eBook reader to replace it. Peanut Press, Fictionwise, and Mobipocket were all in business selling eBooks retail, and Project Gutenberg and others were posting public domain eBooks on the internet. Some of the big six publishers were also releasing some of their new titles in eBook format, although these were often delayed after the paper books were released.
To get an overall picture, however, it is interesting to look at the American Publishers Association eBook sales data. The first data I saw, (and have kept) are from the first quarter of 2002. From then on, sales have grown more or less exponentially, with occasional slight declines. In the early years, however, few people noticed or cared if the trivial eBook market was growing exponentially. Two times trivial is still trivial. 4 times trivial can be comfortably ignored. 32, 64, and 128 times trivial are big business.
So, to summarize: I dispute that there was an unexpected or surprising surge in eBook sales that only happened because Amazon started selling eBooks and Kindle readers. In my opininion, Amazon was the lucky retailer that caught a growing wave of business in a new market, and has sucessfully ridden the wave ever since. Without Amazon and the Kindle, the wave would have happened anyway, and we would all be talking about some other company.
Gary
Not sure about that, Gary. I was also an early adopter of ebooks, and bought a hell of a lot of them for my Palm devices. Despite their convenience otherwise, back then ebooks had to be bought on sites and manually downloaded to a desktop or laptop. Then you had to transfer them manually to your handheld device. If you were also reading any ebooks on your computer, I don’t think there was any way to sync them.
Amazon produced a very simple, handheld device which would automatically download and sync your purchased ebooks. You could buy ebooks from that device, anywhere you had a connection. Amazon’s site was very easy to use, and exposed a very large established physical-goods customer base to ebooks. I still miss aspects of Fictionwise’s setup, but Amazon’s associative algorithms have led me to read more new authors.
Just like Apple with the iPod and iTunes, Amazon developed exactly what an established demographic would readily adopt. Sony didn’t have the established customer base, and its ecosystem was (and still is!) difficult to use. Palm was serially mismanaged. Successful independent ebook sites were gutted by geolims and agency fixing. Amazon created a comprehensive offering which was too good, overall, for the publishers (and customers) to refuse.
I agree that Amazon effectively cut the redskins off at the pass, but there were real redskins, and they were galloping — OK, trotting — in that direction. I maintain that most of the pressure to produce legitimate eBooks came from the enormous success of illegitimate ones. In fact, it was about the time that people started to make noises about the range and number of pirated books that were available via file-sharing that the publishers decided it was better to share their booty with Amazon than let the pirates sail off with it into the sunset.