A new study released from Nielsen touts that 41% of all internet purchases worldwide were for books, an increase of 7% in the last two years and the number of people who shop online has grown 40% in the same two years.
“Some of the biggest buyers of books on the Internet are from developing countries—China, Brazil, Vietnam and Egypt—indicating massive growth potential for online retailers that can specifically target these fast-growing markets” says Jonathan Carson of Nielsen Online.
Here at home books made up 38% of all online purchases.
While sales climb online sales at brick and mortar bookstores were up in November for the 5th consecutive month. Sales rose 7.5%, to $1.19 billion, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Books outpaced the gain in sales for the entire retail segment by about 1%.
Abebooks.com one of the leading online book e-tailers saw an 11% gain in sales last year with total sales on the site reaching $190 million.
So where do we go from here? What about the future?
In a recent piece in New York Times Magazine, Keeping It Real, James Gleick gives us a little glimpse. Though his piece focuses on the recent auction of the Magna Carta at Sotheby’s it is not much of a leap to see the “magical value” he talks about being applied to printed books.
Gleick says:
“The same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.”
So while the race is on to free the content from the book, the actual book itself, the original house for the content, becomes in fact more desirable.
Viva la books.