Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, increasing 1,259 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.
Photo: AP
“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.”
However, the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by this year, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Now there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print or becoming hybrid readers who toggle between devices and paper. E-book sales fell 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 about 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as 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 members with stores in 2,227 locations this year, up from 1,410 members in 1,660 locations five years ago.
“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” association chief executive Oren Teicher said. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”
Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 20,253m2 to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 18,580m2.
Penguin Random House has invested nearly US$100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 33,910m2 last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Indiana, 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, 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 US.
The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months. Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.
Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.
“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Dohle said.
At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Texas, sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making this year the store’s most profitable year ever, co-owner Steve Bercu said. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.
“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.
Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.
“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”
Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.
The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.
However, those double and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. About 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, Forrester Research said. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of this year, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.
Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.
As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a US$12.99 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.
On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.
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,” Simon & Schuster president and CEO Carolyn Reidy said. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”
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