I think this is going to turn out to be the month a lot of people realize that industry statistics–long an imperfect set of measures–are struggling mightily in mapping the complex and booming body of content that has some relationship to “books.” Earlier this week Bowker released preliminary statistics on new titles published during 2008, making a distinction between “traditional book publishing” and “on-demand/short-run” books. (The split was actually introduced last year, but drew more attention this year as title growth in the latter category more than doubled to 285,000 titles, making it larger than the “traditional” segment’s 275,000 titles.) […]
Industry Statistics
On Demand Books Overtake Traditional Titles for the First Time
Bowker’s preliminary data for books published in the US in 2008 shows that output from traditional publishers declined by about 3 percent to 275,232 new titles. But they project that the number of “on demand” books grew 132 percent to 285,394 books, now exceeding the traditional titles. The biggest declines for traditional publishers came in travel (down by 15 percent, with 4,817 new titles), fiction (down 11 percent, with 47,541 new titles the largest of all categories), and religion (down 14 percent, at 16,847 titles).Release
Early Insights from BISG Conference
A few things to share from the Making Information Pay Conference this morning. Consultant Mike Shatzkin at the Idea Logical Company offered results from a survey and follw-up interviews conducted with 250 publishing people prior to the event looking at how sales channels are shifting in these challenged times. While everyone is seeing brick-and-mortar trade sales fall, there was “some questiona s to whether indies or chains are falling faster.” There was also “widespread agreement that library budgets cuts will affect publishers adversely,” whether or not that has shown up in industry statistic yets. They “did see much more gloom […]
Some Kindle User Data
Further to our London Book Fair report on Bowker PubTrack’s consumer survey data about demographic preferences for different e-readers, and the larger theme of understanding that different people prefer different e-reading platforms, Richard Curtis’s blog tipped us to a popular Amazon forum asking “Kindle Owner’s Age.” Though there are a lot of posts to page through, the forum is highly recommended for anyone wanting to better understand the Kindle consumer. We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about 700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings, which show very similar age distributions). Per […]
Bookstore Burrowings
So one of my wonkier habits is scrolling through the lengthy SEC filings of major public companies in the book industry, exacerbated by recent annual reports from Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-a-Million. (The detailed filings often share interesting tidbits we don’t get to in the basic earnings releases and ensuing conference calls.) Among the things we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks: Borders sold just over $2 billion worth of books last, out of total revenue of $3.242 billion, or a little under 62 percent of sales. Books-a-Million, on the other hand, says that 83 percent of their […]
UK Hardcovers Fall Hard, But US Market Shows Resilience
The Bookseller reports on Nielsen BookScan UK data that shows “a slump across hardcover sales,” as unit sales for the top 5,000 hardcovers fell 14.3 percent for the first quarter of 2009. And the top 400 hardcover fiction title sales fell 17.2 percent in units in that period. In the US, however, a big rise in juvenile hardcovers helped the total market for hardcovers rise by almost 3 percent in the first thirteen weeks. Despite dire selected reports, for the outlets covered in the US by Nielsen BookScan, total unit sales for the first quarter declined only 2.1 percent, at […]