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Five years ago, the book world was seized by
collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, ebook
sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008
and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched
consumers use their stores to find titles they would
later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores
struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors
feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their
business.
Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were
realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight
up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of
the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research
group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about
everybody you talked to thought we were going the
way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at
least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted
that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital
sales have instead slowed sharply.
Now, there are signs that some e-book
adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid
readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales
fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year,
according to the Association of American Publishers,
which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers.
Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a
few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that
publishing, while not immune to technological
upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital
technology better than other forms of media, like
music and television.
E-book subscription services, modeled on
companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to
convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and
some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading
devices have plunged as consumers migrated to
tablets and smartphones. And according to some
surveys, young readers who are digital natives still
prefer reading on paper.
The surprising resilience of print has provided
a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores,
which were battered by the recession and competition
from Amazon, are showing strong signs of
resurgence. The American Booksellers Association
counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in
2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years
ago.
Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift,
are pouring money into their print infrastructures and
distribution. Penguin Random House has invested
nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its
warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books.
It added 365,000 square feet last year to its
warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling
the size of the warehouse.
“People talked about the demise of physical
books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50
to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of
our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive
of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250
imprints globally. Print books account for more than
70 percent of the company’s sales in the United
States.
Some 12 million e-readers were sold last
year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in
2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of
people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to
32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50
percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.
The tug of war between pixels and print
almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and
publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the
death of the digital publishing revolution. An
appealing new device might come along. Already, a
growing number of people are reading e-books on
their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new
tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of
customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost
$400)
At Amazon, digital book sales have
maintained their upward trajectory, according to
Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle.
Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of
the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription
service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee
of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more
than a million titles, many of them from selfpublished
authors.
Some publishing executives say the world is
changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is
waning.
“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn
Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon &
Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read
books on their smartphones, and will we see another
burst come?”
www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23
As to the waning of the digital tide, Carolyn
Reidy, from Simon & Schuster, thinks that
