Traditionally published books and ebooks are doing better then most people previously thought. A recently compiled report by Bookstats according to the New York Times as the “the most comprehensive publishing industry survey yet.”
BookStats is published in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. They recently completed a three year study that monitored the sales of both ebooks and traditional book sales. The company surveyed over 1,963 different publishers and found some interesting statistics.
In 2010 over 2.6 billion books were sold, accounting for over 27.9 billion dollars in revenue garnered. Meanwhile only 114 million ebooks were sold but made huge gains from prior years. In 2008 the electronic form of the book accounted for 1% of all books sold, while last year rose to 6.4%.
Part of the reason ebooks saw a dramatic increase in market share was due to the decrease of cost of popular e-readers. The Kindle, Nook, and Kobo continue to lead in sales and are the devices of choice for many readers.
One of the most important segments that is growing at an accelerated pace is books that center around higher education. Due to the amount of higher education schools, the industry grew to 4.55 billion dollars in sales in 2010, while trade books grew 5.8 percent to 13.9 billion dollars. This is partly due to the resurgence of vampire, paranormal, zombie, and Harry Potter books.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
