“Nothing is as good at being a book as a book is”- Douglas Adams: Where is the consumer market heading in the face of the digital age?

The release of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments has seen the publishing charts house it’s fifth most successful hardback fiction launch since 2000, with 103,177 books selling in the first week of publication. At least 45,000 of these sales are estimated to be from the pre-sale figures alone.

On Nielson data, the market split between print and digital becomes a stark contrast. With 30,000 of that 45,000 being printed sales, and the other 15,000 split between e-book and audiobook, the digitisation of the publishing industry comes under question again. Nicholas Carr talks about how e-books, “rather than replacing printed books, will ultimately […] complement to traditional reading” (Carr, 2013). A steady decline in the purchasing of e-books has clearly demonstrated this exact trend. Print books are clearly around for the long haul despite their predicted demise in recent years. Pew Research Centre reported that “90% of e-book readers continue to read physical volumes” (Carr, 2013), proving that the physical book really is an experience that cannot be replaced.

E-reader sales have dropped drastically as customers are more attracted to multi-purpose tablets, making people even less likely to read digitally as apps and games that offer much easier, lighter entertainment are much more appealing in that medium. While being cheaper and taking up no physical space, e-books are inherently unshareable, which is of huge importance when it comes to books. You can’t sell on an e-book, or donate it to a charity shop, or lend it to a friend to read, which in turn is harmful to authors as it can be harder to get their name spreading around reading circles.

On the other hand, e-books can be the perfect format for genre fiction like sci-fi where you might be tearing through the books faster than you can store them, or for example books you might be “embarrassed to be seen reading”, Carr (2013) mentions the “Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon”, not a book some people would be proud to put on their shelf, better tucked away in their Kindle. While e-books have their advantages, at the end of the day they have proved not to be able to compete with the print market as well as they should. Harper Collins at The Electric Theatre admitted their “predictions of where e-book sales would be” were “way under” (Adams, 2013).

Books themselves have become “a commodity”(Adams, 2013), the desire of the physical page is more compelling to most readers, they can hold and see the book they now own, unlike an e-book that is bound to specific devices and apps where you are technically leasing the book for much more money than is logical for something with very little production costs. After all, “Nothing is as good at being a book as a book is” (Adams, 2012).

Adams, D. (2013) The e-book debate [Online] Available at: https://keithpp.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/the-e-book-debate/ [Accessed 3/10/2019]

Adams, D, Lawson, S. (2013) Nothing is as good at being a book as a book is [Online] Available at: https://keithpp.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/nothing-is-as-good-at-being-a-book-as-a-book-is/ [Accessed 3/10/2019]

Carr, N. (2013) Don’t Burn Your Books — Print Is Here to Stay [Online] Available at: https://keithpp.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/dont-burn-your-books-print-is-here-to-stay/ [Accessed 3/10/2019]

Jones, P. (2019) How big is the pre-order market? [Online] Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/how-big-pre-order-market-1084216 [Accessed 27/09/2019]