US eBook Market Grew by 5% in Q1 2013, AAP Reports
The AAP has put out a new press release today with some tidbits on the the state of the US book market. The data is drawn from the StatShot report, and while I don’t have all the stats available but what I do have is a little startling.
Update: If you came to this post via one of the articles which argued ebook sales are flattening, don’t believe it. That conclusion is wrong, and I can prove it.
The AAP is reporting that the 1192 publishers which submit their sales data to the AAP did not see a significant increase in the ebook market in the first quarter of this year. Sales of adult ebooks increased by 13%, but children’s ebooks dropped by 30% (religious ebooks held steady).
The overall ebook market grew from $374.8 million to $393.6 million, or about 5%. That is far below the growth reported in previous years, but it is still good news. The AAP also reported the total reported book sales dropped by 4.7% (from $1.5 billion to $1.4 billion) thanks to a severe drop in the children’s and YA segment (24.6%).
In that context the 5% growth is not bad. Audiobooks also increased by 14% ($24.8 million to $28.3 million), so there is some good news.
In spite of the spectacular growth of ebooks in 2008 to 2011, we all know that eventually the ride would come to a stop as the growth of ebook market share slowed. TBH I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.
Of course, these statistics only represent publishers sending their data to the AAP and not the entirety of the US ebook market. One can still hope that indie pub saw better growth than this.
For those who are interested, here is the data:
image by historygradguy
No Comments