Today Amazon alerted the world that for the first time the sale of Kindle books has surpassed the sale of all printed books. In less than four years the electronic newcomer has taken a strong hold. The rise in e-books has “resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business” in over 10 years and even caught CEO Jeff Bezos by surprise who said “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly.”
The announcement comes right on the heels of R. R. Bowker’s release of their annual report on U.S. print book publishing which says that even in the face of the rise of the digital book the production of printed books actually increased by 5%. Before we break out the champagne and start the “Print Isn’t Dead” chant we need to look a little closer at the individual genres. What we see does not bode well – the only increases are in the Science, Computer and Technology fields. Literature, poetry, history and biography all suffered double digit declines. Whether it was because of the sluggish economy or that these are the categories that are best suited for the non-traditional approach is not entirely clear but either way, at some point, there has to be some sort of cultural consequence. We need to feed the right side of our brain as much as the left.
While much of the focus has centered on the meteoric rise of e-books and their effect on the publishing industry it is the print-on-demand segment that has really taken off. In 2010 there were almost 8 times the number of print-on-demand titles then traditional titles! Below is a graph of the leaders in that space, notice how much of the output is concentrated in the top three players.
Since 2002, the production of traditional books as increased 47%, while non-traditional titles rose 8,460%.
It’s a brave new world.