Gutenberg Be Gone: E-books Posting Profits
Americans are increasingly reading books not in hardcover or softcover, but online and in digital formats. In 2012, publishers earned 20 percent of their revenues from e-book formats according to a publishing industry survey. As Julie Bosman reported for the New York Times:
“In a year that was monopolized by the “Fifty Shades” erotic novels and their various knockoffs, e-book sales in fiction rose 42 percent over the year before, to $1.8 billion. Growth in nonfiction e-book sales was smaller, a 22 percent increase, to $484.2 million. E-book sales in the children’s and young-adult categories increased 117 percent, to $469.2 million.”
In contrast, sales remained flat in traditional print formats.
The numbers reflected a publishing industry in which more books are available in more formats than ever before, and where consumers’ preferences continue to shift. Print formats were flat or decreasing, while e-books and downloadable audio books boomed.
“You’re seeing an evolution in terms of the way that people are accessing content,” said Dominique Raccah, a former chairwoman of the Book Industry Study Group and the publisher of Sourcebooks, a midsize publishing company in Naperville, Ill., outside Chicago. “Audio downloads are up, e-books are up. There’s a migration in format clearly occurring. Customers can now access books in a lot of different ways.”
This heralds a new era for publishing as readers continue to flock towards new formats. Between Johannes Gutenberg and the Kindle, there hadn’t been much innovation in publishing. The technology may have changed, but the traditional format of printed words on pages bound together had dominated for half a millennium. Now, as these figures show, there’s a new era without one dominant format–but the trend is clearly away from paper.
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