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Blogs by Terry W Burns
New Publishing Industry Numbers 6/1/2007 6:35:05 AM
Publishers Marketplace released some new numbers this morning. Bowkers has changed the way it calculates new titles to recognize POD and other publishing sources
and that resulted in an astounding 291,290 titles,an increase of 120,000 titles over the way they would have calculated it before. The recalibration took the 2004 numbers to over 295,000 titles. That is amazing.
Sales are estimated at $29.6 billion which is a growth of 2.7% but unfortunately it is due to price increases rather than sales growth. Christian book sales continues to lead the way WITH A 20% GROWTH in units sold. Adult paperbacks led the way and childrens books was the big loser. Juvenile had a small increase but not as much as expected.
Another interesting fact for me in the report was a prediction that a big shift to electronic college textbooks was finally coming. I've said for some time that the e-book industry would experience significant growth when textbooks started being produced that way and people started getting acclimated to reading that way. I thought the quality of the devices would be a major part in that but this study says that is not as much of a factor as "price, accessability and portability." I guess that makes sense, although in the report they say "the el-hi markets and college markets are flat." Kinda contradicting.
The big winner in all this seems to be Amazon as more and more people buy their books online and of course Amazon leads the pack there. What they don't talk about in this report, regardless of how they crunch the numbers and who is winning or losing is the fact that people are reading books. And that should be good news for all of us.
