Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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1.7 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by broad category at Olympic, units and dollars
We are still working with very broad categories, however. Let’s drill down a little further and examine the patterns for different categories of books, using a selected number of standard BISAC subject headings.6 Figures 1.8 and 1.9 break down ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic (for the data on which these figures are based, see appendix 1). Figure 1.8 is net dollars and Figure 1.9 is net units. (Again, the y-axis has been adjusted to display the S-curves.) These graphs vividly display the enormous variation in the uptake of ebooks across different categories of books, and underscore how misleading it is to collapse all of these categories into the single category of ‘ebook’. We see the huge spectrum of trajectories here, with each category of book displaying its own distinctive S-curve. Each S-curve rises in its own unique way and begins to level off at a point and in a manner that is specific to that category. In some cases, the growth plateaus and then stabilizes more or less at that level; in some cases, it plateaus and then begins to decline; in some cases, the growth levels off and declines and then shoots back up; and in other cases, the growth never takes off at all. We also see a lot of movement up and down – the lines jump about, dips are followed by rises and rises are followed by dips as the numbers for each category fluctuate from one year to the next. There’s nothing too surprising about that: these graphs are based on sales figures from one large trade house which has a limited number of books in any one category in any one year, so one or two books selling strongly as ebooks (or other special circumstances, like the disposal or acquisition of an imprint) can produce an ebook spike or dip in that category. The sales figures from one publisher – even a large publisher like Olympic – will display idiosyncrasies of this kind and therefore cannot be taken as a proxy for the industry as a whole. But by focusing on the broad patterns and trends rather than the fluctuations from one year to the next, we can get a good sense of how different categories of books have performed over time.
Figure 1.8 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic, net dollars
Figure 1.9 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic, net units
As these data make clear, the top-performing category in terms of ebook uptake is not business books after all, it is romance fiction – this outperforms every other category by a significant margin. Here we see steep growth from 2008 to 2011, by which time ebooks were accounting for 44.2% of all Olympic’s sales of romance books. Ebook sales dipped the following year but then rose again, accounting for around 55% of all romance sales in 2013 and 2014. In 2015 they fell back to 45% but then rebounded in 2016, when they once again amounted to around 53% of all Olympic’s sales of romance books. Of all the different categories of books published by Olympic, romance is the one where ebooks have accounted for the highest proportion of overall sales – more than half – and it’s a category where ebook sales remain high despite the downturn in other categories.
At the other end of the scale, juvenile nonfiction has seen very low levels of ebook uptake. The line for this category is flat and hardly rises off the floor of the graph – ebooks accounted for only 2% of Olympic’s revenue in the category of juvenile nonfiction in 2015, rising slightly to 2.6% in 2016. Here we don’t see an S-curve because there has not yet been any perceptible take off in terms of ebook sales in this category of books: 97% of the revenue in 2016 was still being generated by printed books.
Between romance at the top and juvenile nonfiction at the bottom there is a huge range and variation in terms of ebook uptake – each category leaves its own distinctive footprint. But while the trajectories are all unique, the lines band together in certain groups. The top four lines all represent categories of fiction, and the top three lines are all genre fiction categories – romance at the top, followed by mystery and detective fiction, and then sci-fi and fantasy. General fiction is among this set of categories in which ebooks perform strongly, although the line for general fiction is below the genre fiction lines.7 Ebook sales in all four categories show a steep rise between 2008 and 2012, reaching levels that are much higher than with other categories of books. While romance plateaus at around 55% and then fluctuates after that, the other three fiction categories plateau at between 30 and 40%. Most of these categories display some modest decline after the peak period of 2012–14, though ebook sales of romance titles at Olympic experienced a new upsurge in 2016.
The next band of lines in the middle of the graphs all represent nonfiction categories – biography and autobiography, history, business and economics, family and relationships, health and fitness, religion, self-help. Once again, all of these lines rise steeply in the period between 2008 and 2011 and then begin to level off, though at lower levels than the fiction categories. Biography and autobiography and history continued to edge upwards after 2011, reaching 27% in 2015, and then fell sharply after that. Health and fitness reached 24% in 2015 and then began to fall. Other nonfiction categories like business and economics, family and relationships, religion and self-help reached plateaus of between 15 and 20%, and either stabilized at that level or began to fall off. So, between 2011 and 2015, all of these nonfiction categories appear to have plateaued somewhere between 16 and 27% – or, to put it more roughly, between 15 and 25%, with biography and autobiography and history at the top of this band.
At the bottom of the graphs is another set of categories where ebooks have so far failed to take off in any significant way and, by 2016, they still accounted for only a small proportion of overall revenue. Here we find cooking, where ebooks never rose above 5% of sales, juvenile nonfiction, where ebook sales never rose above 3% of sales, and juvenile fiction, where ebooks rose to 12.7% in 2014 and then fell back to 6% in 2016.8 Travel also belongs in this band: ebook sales in travel never took off at Olympic, generally remaining below 12% of total sales, and the spike in 2016 was an anomaly accounted for by particular circumstances at the time. Given that ebooks have not taken off in any significant way in these categories (excluding young adult), the growth lines since 2008 don’t display the pattern of the classic S-curve: they look more like flat lines with gentle inclines that tilt upwards (and occasionally downwards).
Explaining the variations
The data from Olympic make it very clear that there are enormous variations in the uptake of ebooks across different categories of books, and data from other large trade houses would almost certainly display similar patterns – they would not be identical, but the overall patterns would be broadly similar. How can we explain these differences? Why do some categories display much higher percentages of ebook sales relative to total sales, and higher e/p ratios (that is, ebook sales relative to print sales), than other categories?
We can’t explain the differences in terms of the factors that are commonly associated with ebooks – namely, the convenience of being able to purchase ebooks quickly, easily, any time and any place; the convenience of being able to carry multiple ebooks with you wherever you go – indeed, to carry a small library that has no more weight and bulk than a small paperback; the convenience of being able to vary the size of the typeface; and, of course, the price – the fact that ebooks are generally cheaper than print books (though how much cheaper depends on many factors, as we shall see in a later chapter). These factors don’t explain the differences because they are common to all ebooks – a travel book or cookbook is just as easy to purchase and just as lightweight in ebook format as a romance or a thriller. So the explanation must lie elsewhere.
The most striking difference