New Statistics Model for Book Industry Shows Trade Ebook Sales Grew Over 1,000 Percent

New Statistics Model for Book Industry Shows Trade Ebook Sales Grew Over 1,000 Percent. Library Journal. Michael Kelley. August 9, 2011.
A new annual survey of the total U.S. book publishing industry shows growing revenue and exponential eBook sales.

The industry sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase over 2008.  Publishers' net sales revenue grew to $27.94 billion in 2010, a 5.6 percent increase over 2008. Net revenue from trade books grew 5.8 percent since 2008, to $13.94 billion.

Within the trade segment, eBooks, again excluding the robust growth that has occurred in 2011, grew from 0.6 percent of the total trade market share in 2008 to 6.4 percent in 2010, which translates to a 1,274.1 percent increase in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year, with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 million. In the same three years, 114 million ebooks were sold, a 1,039.6 percent increase. In adult fiction, ebooks represent 13.6 percent of the net revenue market share.

Online sales became an increasingly important distribution channel. Net sales revenue for content distributed online was $2.82 billion in 2010, a three-year overall growth of 55.2 percent. Net unit sales by publishers to online channels grew 68.6 percent, to 276 million in 2010.

For 2010, overall bricks-and-mortar trade retail remained the largest distribution channel in the United States (40.8 percent). In contrast to the eBook numbers, total net sales revenue of trade hardcovers in 2010 was $5.26 billion, an increase of only 0.9 percent over the three years, and its share of the market declined from 39.6 percent in 2008 to 37.7 percent in 2010. Softcover revenue was up 1.2 percent to $5.27 billion, with a similar decline in market share, and mass-market paperback net sales revenue was down 13.8 percent to $1.28 billion.