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Will e-books take over 80% of narrative text sales?
October 21, 2011 | 2:43 pm
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By Chris Meadows
A week ago, Mike Shatzkin wrote that he foresees a digital future in which e-books have an 80% market share (by units sold, not revenue) of narrative text, and sees it happening within the next two to five years. And given that it is now easy for individuals or businesses that are not publishers in a traditional sense to publish e-books of their own, he is concerned about whether print publishers can maintain their primacy in the field when that happens.
This week, Shatzkin has followed up with a post looking at the reasoning behind his 80% prediction. He addresses objections he has received since making the prediction. Fundamentally, Shatzkin sees the decreasing cost of e-readers and the rising rate of adoption by the people who buy the most books as being likely to continue for several years until it reaches a point of saturation.
In fact, at some point the switchover from print to ebooks will slow to a crawl. Sales of straight text books won’t reach 98% digital for many years, perhaps decades. What I’d expect is that we’ll reach a point of print resistance and adoption will slow down dramatically. We can argue about where that point will be. I think it is 80%. A major executive was reported to have said in Frankfurt that he thinks ebook sales will “plateau” at 40%. (Maybe he meant 40% of revenue, which, depending on how much of the house’s output was straight text, would probably be nearer to 60% of straight text units.) Everybody’s entitled to their opinion and only time will prove us right or wrong.
The whole thing strikes me a bit oddly, given that we’re at the cusp of a major change in the e-book industry. Consider that just a couple of years ago, the idea that e-books would ever “beat out” print books was the realm of pure science fiction. It was one of the premises of Star Trek, in fact (see our articles on “Picard’s Syndrome”), and was tantamount to the idea that someday we would all have our own personal rocket packs. Realistically speaking, that day wasn’t even on the horizon.
But now, thanks largely to the Kindle, the e-book market has revved up so fast it makes your head spin, and the percentage of e-book adoption is now in the double digits. In practically the blink of an eye, we’ve gone from the all-e-book future being pure science fiction to a mostly-e-book future being all too plausible. Has any idea ever gone from science fiction to reality quite so fast? It’s not surprising that pundits might have a hard time prognosticating how digital the future will be.
Perhaps the most fascinating part is that this isn’t a case where our distant descendants will find out who was right or wrong. We will find out, in just a few short years, whether e-books take over the market or not. Shatzkin may be right, or he may be wrong—but either way, it won’t be too long until we know for sure.
I’m looking forward to it.
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Comments:
I think that Mr. Shatzkin is predicting the ebook takeover to happen too soon.
I think that ebook sales, of fiction, in English, in the USA and Canada, MAY get to 50% of sales in 2 to 5 years but not to 80%.
If we are talking about sales of all books (fiction and non fiction), in all languages, worldwide, I don’t think that ebook sales will hit 50% of the total in less than 20 years.
Gary
I’m with Shatzkin, given his restrictions: narrative texts, US market. These changes happen quickly. In the still-photography world, serious photographers were still mostly using 35mm film in 2006. Somewhere around 2007-2008, the pros and other serious photographers made an en masse shift toward digital SLRs. In the few years since then, Kodak hasn’t been able to unload its massive worldwide film-based infrastructure fast enough (especially in this economy), and Kodak’s now fighting to avoid bankruptcy. And it was Kodak that invented digital photography.
Back to e-books… something Shatzkin didn’t mention in describing the collapse cycle of fewer print purchases -> few printed titles -> fewer print purchases is that the mass-market paperback format is probably on its deathbed.
Still, narrative texts probably don’t comprise anywhere close to a majority of the book titles. Wander around a Barnes & Noble and see how many racks of non-narrative non-fiction books there are, compared with fiction and narrative non-fiction. A quick look at Amazon for hardcover & paperbacks from the past 90 days, available new, suggests that maybe 10% of the printed titles they carry are narrative. [Unit sales figures might be a different story.]
The last times I’ve wandered through a Barnes & Noble I noticed one thing: not many people. (Actually there were more people in its cafe with their notebook computers on its WiFi than out in the shelves.)
Whoops, forgot to link this week’s Shatzkin article. Fixed it.
Whenever I see speculative articles like these I’m reminded of the now (should be) classic piece by Tim Spalding:
http://www.librarything.com/blogs/thingology/2010/11/feedback-loops-in-ebook-success/
Almost a year old and nothing better has yet been written on this subject.
Well, firstly Shatzkin is talking ONLY about the US market. I feel I need to mention that because believe it or not many readers and commenters here are not actually in the US …
I also think Mike is being too optimistic, and underestimating the inertia of people’s reading habits and emotional attachment to paper. I may not live in the US but that kind of thing never stopped me opining before, and why start now …
I believe it will take another 5 -8 years before 50% of all titles sold are eBooks. The next period, to move on to 70% will take another 6-8 years. The last 10% or 15% will be a long long tail.
But by then paper will be a very different product imho. It will be much more expensive. Only a handful of titles will be on shelves. The rest will be POD. and as time progresses it will stabilise at about 5-8%, supported by that element of society that just loves to hate progress, and loves to stick with old fashioned cultural habits. Like Vinyl and Cassettes and tube amps now.
My 2c only.
In an unstable situation, it’s tempting to throw our hands in the air and say that we can’t make predictions. It’s certainly true that we have even less certainty than usual.
But book publishing has always been high-stakes gambling. And if we’re to survive, we all must make some sort of predictions about the future, and act upon them.
The best thing we can do is look for underlying forces, that may drive a change one way or another. These might include the economics of the distribution chain, the volume requirements for a given format to reach break-even, and the emotional needs of our customer base.
Holding some of those customers in contempt (“that element of society that just loves to hate progress” sounds a little condescending, for example) may lead to a failure to understand who will act how.
Then again, the CD is still a major source of revenue for the music industry, no matter how the popular media talk about it being dead. I suspect that the print publishing industry has a little time to adapt.
The major exception to that would be the brick and mortar bookstore, and the mass market paperback. Bookstores will obviously become less common. Trade and mass market books may be a relatively small part of the publishing business, but they are, by definition, what bookstores sell. And they’re also the segment getting hit hardest and first.