Image: www.digitalbookworld.com
With one-click buying, cheaper price points, and the convenience of accessing an e-book, it would seem like a safe bet to predict the decline of the print title. But book buying of the printed variety still booms.
According to the Business Spectator, a study by Deloitte predicts that print will represent more than 80 per cent of all book sales worldwide in 2015 and will generate the majority of book sales ‘for the foreseeable future’.
‘E-books have not substituted print books in the same way that sales of CDs, print newspapers and magazines have declined,’ said Deloitte’s media lead partner Clare Harding.
In Australia, the number of print books being sold is on the rise, with Australians buying 55.4 million print books last year reported The Age.
Martin Shaw, book buyer at Readings told ArtsHub, ‘It’s a difficult one for us because we don’t actually sell e-books. So we can only see that print is seemingly as strong as ever.’
Also unscathed by the digital revolution is independent bookstore Pages & Pages Booksellers. Co-owner Jon Page said, ‘We’ve started to see print sales increase again and that’s a reflection of the market stabilising a bit.’
Increased book sales in the past year may also be attributed to the novelty of new e-reading devices coming to a standstill and ‘people deciding what format they want rather than trying the new thing,’ added Page.
So what are reader habits revealing about their preferred format?
Elizabeth Weiss, academic and digital publisher at Allen & Unwin said there is a very strong pattern in reader habits. ‘It’s quite an established pattern – really since e-books got going as a format of book – that narrative works. So in other words novels, but also biography, books which are primarily a linear narrative, perform best in e-book format and works which are illustrated or internally complex in some way typically don’t sell nearly as well.’
E-books occupy approximately 20 per cent of the market in Australia and are particularly popular in genre fiction such as science fiction and romance. According to Page, there has been an approximate 10 per cent decline in those sales.
‘But in saying that, literary fiction is still quite strong and those books are more driven by recommendations as well so we have been able to sell and stock big numbers of those because people are coming in for that,’ said Page.
Page attributes the human interaction in a brick and mortar store to why people return from the e-book. ‘They are not getting that personal recommendation because they are dependent on emails and whatever their e-retailer sends them rather than that personal conversation with a real human being about what they should read.’
Where e-books lack the human connection, they make up in convenience, said Weiss. ‘In the first couple of weeks of a new release title, a major commercial fiction title – let’s say a Kate Morton or a Michael Connelly, those kind of authors – we can sell up to 50% of total sales in e-book edition in the first couple of weeks of a book’s life. That will slip back over time, but very often the people who want it immediately are buying it for themselves and they want it now and they want it on release.’
While you could assume the digital revolution and devices with plenty of bells and whistles would bring a new market for illustrated books, Weiss said unfortunately this hasn’t been the case as children’s books and cookbooks don’t render well on screens.
‘We would be selling one, two, three, four, or five per cent e-books of total sales for categories like illustrated cookbooks, sporting biography, Australiana or children’s picture books,’ said Weiss.
‘We routinely convert those titles to e-books format but you’re just not getting the same experience,’ she said, ‘The proportions of the design are not the same, you can’t always capture the fonts… you mostly can’t reproduce the design you are proving the content… but the layout is not, it’s a faint resemblance and you are missing out on things like high quality paper stock, the weight or the proportions,’ added Weiss.
Another contributor to the unpopularity in categories like children’s books could come down to parents. As a child’s “screen time” is monitored, print books are often favoured as ‘kids won’t read a book in their precious screen,’ laughed Weiss. With the multitude of distractions on a device, parents also prefer a print book as it aids focus.
Sales at Pages & Pages also reflect this. ‘Children’s books are still big. That is the category that has weathered the whole digital online high dollar storm,’ said Page, ‘They couldn’t be knocked off it. They continued to grow where the rest of the market went backwards from 2010-2013.’
Pointing to another reason why print reigns supreme in terms of sales, Weiss also observed that e-books are more often than not a personal purchase, but social habits of gift giving have not changed with the technology. People still want to buy a physical object as a gift.
The proportion of sales in print verse digital for titles such as Australiana, popular history, cookbooks and sporting biographies – which are often purchased as gifts – are indicative of this habit.
‘It’s not surprising the e-book sales of books like that are very, very small,’ said Weiss.
Recognising the consumer’s gift giving habits, Pages & Pages was keen to expand to the digital space, partnering with HarperCollins and Kobo to offer digital and print bundles on selected titles.
‘In terms of bundling, I see it as a really great way to make the hardcover the premier edition,’ said Page, who added bundles are a wonderful package for book buyers, especially when it comes to gifts if you are unsure of someone’s reading habits.
Beside offering risk-free gift buying (if your friend only uses e-readers, than you can keep the print copy), bundles also offer flexibility with a ‘personal library anywhere you go,’ as Page described.
When it comes to longform narrative, Weiss agreed the flexibility offered is superior. ‘I think most readers would say they can be just as immersed in an e-book edition as a print edition, they can lose themselves in a book perfectly happy on a device.’
‘There is very little damage done to that reading experience. In fact you can pick it up where you left off in the doctors surgery or the bus queue or whatever it is as your smartphone is always with you and it is small and light and in fact it’s more convenient than a print book.’
Yet we shouldn’t confuse convenience with superiority, warns Weiss. ‘Books are a very successful, established, reliable technology and we somehow think digital has to be better, and it is for some things and purposes, but it is not just inherently better.’
The flexibility and accessibility offered by the e-book has helped to expand the market, rather than signal the demise of the printed book.
‘Just as the rise of the mass-market paperback in the 1940s expanded the reading market without killing off hardbacks, the rise of the e-book may have expanded the market, without signalling the end of the printed work,’ reported the Business Spectator.
Instead, new technology and digital editions have created a whole new audience and expanded the market with lower price points.
‘More people are reading more things, so it’s a good scenario really,’ concluded Page.
