A rebound in book sales

I mentioned earlier that the general consensus at BEA was that the corner had turned on the downward spiral of the book business. The AAP / BISG joint report will release full numbers in July but their survey of 1,100 publishers showed that 2008 was the bottom and modest gains could be seen for the last three years. They stressed that paperback books continue to decline and ebooks keep showing triple digit growth so I expect that when the numbers are released we'll see that ebooks (which many in the industry see as the enemy) will actually turn out to be its savior.

To mirror this, the March 2011 numbers show that total trade sales were ahead of last year's numbers, and by a good margin. With print sales falling $20 million and ebook sales rising $41 million, total trade sales for March of $413.5 million were up about $21 million--or more than 5% percent--from the same month a year ago.

What's really good about the above information is that it is based on dollars not units. I know many got excited when Amazon announced that ebooks are now outselling paperback and hardcovers combined (As of early April they stated for every 100 print books they sold 105 kindle books - including print books that had no kindle version). But considering the price point of many ebooks this is not a huge surprise. I'm sure Nestle sells more chocolate than Godiva.

To me the more important data from Amazon was that their us book business was outperforming other areas: "the fastest year-over-year growth rate, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years."

I'll continue to keep a close eye on the market as a whole and report for you information that I find along the way. But all in all it looks like there is reason for the optimism I saw, although I'm not sure those there realized that it was ebooks may very well be the saving grace.