E-book sales top paperbacks for first time

[sparkchaser]

E-book sales top paperbacks for first time

E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 "among all categories of trade publishing" that month -- the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.

But an AAP representative noted that the report comes with some big caveats. First, the net sales data are compiled from publishers, not from book retailers like Barnes & Noble. Publishers submit that data voluntarily, and some choose not to do so.

Interesting.

 

[beer good]

It's *adult* paperbacks, too - with the rise in YA publishing over the last few years, that's a significant portion of the market that's left out of the comparison.

Still, inch by inch.

 

[crlovel]

It's sad. I was thinking about the loss of so many Borders, my favorite book store, when it kinda dawned on me, why should I care? I use an eReader for almost everything now. Publishing seems to be the next industry about to be made obsolete, with countless people put out of work, and I'm not sure it's being replaced by something much better. The eReaders are great space savers, sure, but sharing is a pain at best, prices are little better, you can't buy or sell used books, and more.

 

[beer good]

Publishing seems to be the next industry about to be made obsolete, with countless people put out of work, and I'm not sure it's being replaced by something much better.

I think it depends a lot on how publishers choose to approach the new technology and everything that goes with it. I know that I for one wouldn't want to have to sort through millions of self-published books to weed out the few authors who can actually write and bother with things like proofreading and proper formatting - you just need to read a few posts on the writer's block on this very forum to see the sort of stuff you'd have to wade through to find authors worth reading. Not to mention that I assume writers want to, well, write - not spend all their time doing designing, marketing, tech support, legal work, etc that the publishers handle for them now. That said, it's definitely a huge challenge. There was a lot of interesting discussion about this at the London Book Fair last week:

Will Book Publishers Ever Be Irrelevant? : Tech News and Analysis «

LBF vote shows that publishers are still relevant | FutureBook

 

[eldog]

This makes me sad

:sad:

 

[direstraits]

The cream will float to the top, ebook or not. Whatever you decide as the cream, anyway - whether it's top sellers, or acclaimed works.

Publishers publish their fare share of not-so-good-books anyway.

When critical velocity is reached (I have a feeling that's not the correct phrase), you'd get Publishers Weekly-like periodicals (or Library Journal, or NYT reviews, or whatever) doing features on ebooks instead of regular books.

Since the current Publishers Weekly features authors we'd never have heard of anyway (well, most of us), and we buy them on the strength of the review, how is that leap of faith different just because it's in a different format?

There's a market for a reputable literary journal that isn't afraid of the ebook market. The acclaimed authors of tomorrow will probably not print their books in the future. Not near future, I think, but still too soon for hardcore dead-tree fans.

 

[sparkchaser]

Critical mass.

 

[beer good]

The cream will float to the top, ebook or not.

Hence the utter commercial failure of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer.