US Book Reading Habits

[jbcohen]

According to the American Association of Publishers, all numbers are as of May 2011.

Digital categories:

E-Book sales were $90.3 Million, growing 202.3% vs February 2010. Downloaded Audiobooks were $6.9M, an increase of 36.7%.

Trade categories:
Adult Trade categories combined (Hardcover, Paperback and Mass Market) were $156.8M, down 34.4%. Children’s/Young Adult categories combined (Hardcover and Paperback) were $58.5M, a decline of 16.1%
*Year-to-date 2011 vs YTD 2010: E-Books increased by 169.4% while all categories combined of print Trade books declined by 24.8%

Religious books:
February sales of $48.5M were an increase of 5.5%; this reflects growth as well in the category for year-to-date, up 6.1% to $93.9M.

Education categories:
Higher Education sales for YTD (January and February 2011) were $406.9M, down slightly by 5.6% vs YTD 2010. In K-12, YTD sales were $173M, declining 8.9% from 2010.

Professional/Scholarly categories:
Total sales for professional books and journals were $42.9M, a slight drop of 3.6% vs February 2010. Combined sales of University Press (hardcover and paperback) were $6.7M, falling 6% vs last year.

[Rob Lister]

E-Book sales were $90.3 Million, growing 202.3% vs February 2010.

That's a pretty impressive figure. What was the increase 2009-2010.

I wonder if there is a graph somewhere.

[Kumabjorn]

So e-books are up from about $30M? But p-books are down some $64M? Pretty much a zero-sum game then.

[JonathanH]

Someone has pointed out elsewhere (can't find the thread right now), that these are sales reported by traditional publishing houses - and hence the report ignores all the self-published e-book authors. So the game only seems to be zero-sum for existing publishing houses...

[flipreads]

Here's the previous stats and there are several caveats, such as:

The data above represent United States revenues only
The data above represent only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
The data above represent only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
The data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices"
The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

[jbcohen]

Anyone heard of these numbers from Amazon, B&N and BAMM? I think that it would be interesting to see what the retailers say about the matter.