2011 Book Sales Update

As you can see from the chart above, it's been another banner year for ebooks so far, with a 100.9% increase in sales over this time last year. Meanwhile, print books continue to decline, with adult mass market titles taking the biggest hit in a -54.3% nosedive. Overall book trade sales dropped by 6.45% over the prior year, showing that increased ebook sales are not making up entirely for lost print sales. This is due, of course, to the fact that digital editions are a fraction (less than half on average) than that of their respective print entries.

For a more in depth comparison of some key factors relating print to digital here is an infographic which lays out in visual terms such book related statistics as relative market share and growth of ebooks vs. print, the pros and cons of each in ecological terms (i.e. relative carbon emissions and deforestation), as well as the misperception of average production costs between the two mediums (it is at present vastly more expensive per unit to produce an ebook than a hardback, for example).

Most importantly, this is a trend that doesn't look as if it's likely to change anytime soon. With the tablet market riding a wave of rapid expansion and its supporting technological innovation experiencing a relentless momentum of improvement, digital will only continue to consume an ever larger share of the overall book and multimedia market. What this means for authors and publishers is a pivotal shift in our fundamental paradigm unlike anything that's happened since the Renaissance. We are witnessing nothing less than a revolution in the cultural history of our species. Historians will look back on these few years as a turning point, a dividing line that separates two epochs of our literary evolution. The first decade of the 21st century will be the last days that print books were the predominant mode of consuming literary content.