I recently was digging through some stats on the music industry. What an eye opener. From 2001 to 2007, Albums sales (as reported by Neilsen Soundscan) dropped from 650M to 428M. Of the 222M drop in units, 48M went digital. The rest? Over 1 Billion tracks i.e. individual songs downloaded. So physical sales declined, and user behaviour changed.
Was 2008 the beginning of the trend, or even the tipping point for books? or newspapers? or magazines? There's been a lot of interesting pieces on the subject, and of course, a lot of garbage. I've been following teleread, which isn't bad. The AAP reported in January, that November book sales were down 14.4%, and also down over 4% for the year. Meanwhile, ebook sales were up 104% in November, and trending towards +80% on the year. So ebooks are >$100M market wholesale, according to the IDPF, and growing faster on an escalating base. So the market is moving now.
Last night CBC, Canada's National news station, ran a piece on Ebooks and the changing marketplace. Our new venture, Shortcovers, was a part of it. Shortcovers launches later this month.
Check it out:
