According to numbers released today, e-book revenue for U.S. publishers doubled to over $2 billion in 2011, a number that means big changes have already occurred in the book publishing industry and that more are on the way
I know 2011 seems like a million years ago considering what has happened in 2012 so far, but these are the first comprehensive numbers that show just how big e-books grew last year. The report comes from BookStats, a joint venture of the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group; BookStats gets its data from nearly 2,000 U.S. publishers across the four major branches of publishing: trade (all the books directed toward regular consumers), K-12, higher education, and professional and scholarly publishing.
I generally focus on what’s going on in trade publishing. Let me put it into perspective for you:
– In 2010, the trade publishing industry had $13.90 billion in revenues and of that, $869 million was from e-books, or about 6% of the total
– In 2011, overall trade revenues barely moved to $13.97 billion, an increase of 0.5%, while e-book revenues jumped to $2.07 billion, or about 15% of the total
That means that while the trade publishing industry was basically flat in 2011, over $1 billion in revenue ($1.2 billion, to be exact) shifted from print books to e-books.
Complete article here.
Credit: www.forbes.com