It's not a surprise that ebooks are booming, nor that mass-market paperbacks are suffering. What's fascinating is how well hardback books are still selling
Can it be good news or bad news that the six Booker prize contenders have already sold a record 37,500 copies, some 127% more than 2010's chosen sextet managed last year? Bad news, sniff some, because high-minded quality ought to come first. Good news, say bookstore owners, beaming all the way to the bank and getting ready for a Jamie Oliver Christmas bonanza. But maybe the crispest conclusion is simply that this is fascinating news. Because the last time I looked, traditional books, involving words printed on paper, were supposed to be dying as the tornado of digital destruction swept on.
Monstrous gloom is still easy to find, sure enough. Take the latest book sales revenue statistics ? for June ? from the Association of American Publishers. They show adult paperback cash sliding by an eye-watering 63.8% in 12 months, nearly $85m gone missing. And hardcover sales are down 25.4%, too, while ebooks, via Kindle, iPad and Nook, boom away, up 167% for the month, a $50m rise.
Yet even America, in the teeth of the economic storm, can find some comfort in the relative resilience of many hardback categories, as well as books for children. And while the tablet surge may not quite be covering the losses on printed pages yet, it's still buoyant enough to allow cannier differential pricing. Factor in the happy thought that ebooks don't sit around in warehouses waiting for pulping, that demand and supply are cost-effectively matched, and there are some new reasons for a cautious grin.
And Britain? Here, too, the Kindle is surging forward: sales up 20% last year, and this year Amazon.co.uk says it is selling 242 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers. Enter last week, on the US horizon, the new all-singing and dancing Kindle Fire plus two updated ebook versions, priced ever more competitively. The worldwide rate of change is fast, fast, fast.
Yet observe that, according to the Publishers Association, UK book sales were only 7.5% down for the first three months of 2011, and only 4.9% down in revenue terms. Moreover (a consistent, significant theme) hardbacks aren't suffering nearly as much as paperbacks because readers, having read a novel or reference work on their tablet, are often tending to buy a print copy to adorn their shelves. Non-fiction hardbacks in Britain actually began 2011 generating revenues 49% ahead of 2010. The Booker boom isn't coincidental.
If this is the valley of destruction, then many publishers can begin to glimpse distant sunlit uplands. People haven't stopped reading fiction or non-fiction, or paying for what they read. On the contrary, via both Kindle and printed page, they're reading as much as ever. The book isn't dead. The novel isn't dead, either. Ebooks, devoid of printing costs, represent real and potential growth ? with costs far more under control. And maybe mass paperback stores face a dreadful time, but neighbourhood booksellers are gradually growing more confident.
Where there's a book (in Guardian/Observer book month, appropriately enough) there seems to be a way. Huge change, huge upheaval; huge challenges for authors hoping to make a steady living; but huge opportunity, too, as the panic that seized the industry a year or two ago starts to pass.
Of course the statistical underpinnings here are inevitably tentative. No chart tells a complete story. But digital or printed? It isn't a case of one or the other: it's a case of both in their different but complementary ways.
And if that's true, friendly publishers ask, then what about the rest of print? Are newspapers and magazines somehow doomed while we find our feet again?
It's a big question with all manner of inconclusive answers about speed, flexibility, distribution and cost structures in the mix. But if the dirge at book publishing's door two years ago seemed to be "we're doomed", then the ghost of Gutenberg is still alive out there, kicking and finding a way.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/02/future-of-reading-ipad-kindle-hardback
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