Figure 1.6b Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars

There is another important qualification to make about these data: they are for the period 2006–16 only and we cannot extrapolate, on the basis of these data, to the sales patterns for 2017 and subsequent years. Future patterns could change. I’ll return to this issue below. But, for now, let’s focus on what actually happened in the crucial decade from 2006 to 2016.

      Table 1.5 and figure 1.6a show all ebooks as a percentage of Olympic’s total sales by both units and revenue. We see that Olympic’s ebook sales were negligible in 2006 and 2007 but they began to grow rapidly from 2008 on, reaching a peak in 2012, when ebook sales accounted for just under 26% of Olympic’s total revenue. From that point on, ebook sales began to decline as a proportion of total sales, falling to below 23% in 2015 and then down to 17% in 2016. The pattern is very similar for both units and revenue, as one would expect. The levelling off in ebook sales is more vividly displayed when we change the scale of the y-axis on the graph, as in figure 1.6b: here, again, we see that the pattern of ebook sales at Olympic displays the classic technology S-curve.

      However, looking at all ebooks as a percentage of total sales gives us a very partial view of what has happened because it masks the variations between different categories of books. In the early 2000s, before ebooks began to take off, many commentators assumed that when the ebook revolution began, it would be driven primarily by businessmen who wanted to carry business books with them on their business trips, reading at airports and on planes: it was adult nonfiction, and especially business books and ‘big idea’ books, that would, they thought, spearhead the ebook revolution. Were they right? Is that what actually happened?

Table 1.6 and figure 1.7 break down ebooks into three broad categories: adult fiction, adult nonfiction and juvenile (where juvenile includes all children’s books as well as young adult). The figure shows ebooks as a percentage of Olympic’s total sales, by both revenue and units, in each of these broad categories. (As with figure 1.6b, the y-axis has been adjusted to display the S-curve.) It is immediately clear that the category where the biggest change has occurred is not nonfiction but, rather, adult fiction: in terms of revenue, ebooks as a percentage of total revenue in adult fiction increased from 1.0% in 2008 to 43.4% in 2014, before falling back to 37.4% in 2015 and then rebounding slightly to 38.9% in 2016. This contrasts sharply with adult nonfiction, where ebooks as a percentage of total revenue rose from 0.4% in 2008 to 16.6% in 2015, before falling back to 13.2% in 2016 – remaining well below 20% throughout this period. Juvenile lagged even further behind: here ebooks as a percentage of total revenue increased from 0.1% in 2008 to 12.2% in 2014, before falling back to 7.4% in 2015 and 6% in 2016.⁵ Each broad category displays an S-curve but the shape of the curve is different in each case. Adult fiction nearly reaches 45% before it levels off and starts to decline, adult nonfiction levels off at around 15% and, in the case of juvenile, the ebooks peak at around 12% and then fall off. Both adult fiction and juvenile show a sharp downturn in 2015, while adult nonfiction continues to grow very modestly before falling off in 2016.

Table 1.6 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by broad category at Olympic, units and dollars