It’s not entirely a surprise to hear skepticism around the UK’s Publishers Association report. As with all sales-data-based attempts at industry assessment, the data is inadequate to the task.
This, of course, is seen most acutely in industry groups’ assessments of digital sales; it’s well known that Amazon and other online retailers don’t make ebook sales data available. And rather than explaining that we simply don’t have adequate data to assess how much of the market is going to ebooks, publishers’ trade organizations tend to favor the narrative that supports the concept of the print resurgence dear to many.
Most recently, last week’s Publishers Association’s report (touting a 7 percent jump in sales in 2016 over 2015) included a purported rise of 8 percent in physical sales (to the highest level since 2012) and a 17 percent drop in the total consumer ebook market.
As usual, without an understanding of context and nuance, the mainstream media waded right in for the latest doom-of-the-ebook wallow. Chief among these was the Guardian’s piece proclaiming that ebook sales have plunged in the UK “as readers return to print.” In that story, Publishers Association chief Stephen Lotinga speculated that “people are now getting screen tiredness, or fatigue, from so many devices being used, watched, or looked at in their week.” This, of course, as every other screen-distributed medium seems to thrive.
The Guardian published another story on the same day in which it asserted that ebooks have “lost their shine” because “Kindles now look clunky and unhip.” More such misinformed coverage could be found at CNNMoney and Engadget: the pile-on was underway as print fans rejoiced and yet another industry report left the unseeable unsaid: we can only guess at how many ebook sales are out there unless Amazon suddenly becomes more transparent. For now, we have tools such as Author Earnings to offer estimates derived from Amazon sales rankings. (Here’s our summary of their most recent report.)
David Vandagriff at the Passive Voice blog wryly posited that “screen fatigue” sounds like a marketing phrase. He suggested that they might have “considered ‘bookstore fatigue’ or ‘high prices fatigue’ while they were brainstorming.”
And at the Bookseller, editor Philip Jones, arguably the single most astute of all UK industry observers, noted that, when the Publishers Association report announces falling ebook sales, they don’t count Amazon’s numbers, of course, or Bookouture’s, or those from Head of Zeus, Endeavour Press, Amazon Publishing, or self-published writers. “Were we a little clearer about this missing bit, we would not today be reading about how … the ebook was dead (again),” he wrote.
Bottom line: The industry in the UK and US has a real problem—not necessarily of its own making—in trying to assess its digital reach, given the lack of accurate digital sales data from online retailers. While that problem can be laid at the steps of Amazon, it’s the job of publishers associations to characterize what data they do have on digital sales as only partial, and to be wary of contributing to overstatements of what’s known about ebook sales and print supposedly blasting back. Not coming clean about this is misleading to their own customers, as well as to the culture at large.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
