The 2015 sales figures are in, and e-book sales had their first meaningful decline: from $1.6B in 2014 to $1.4B in 2015.
Sales had increased exponentially for a while, then plateaued around $1.5B per year, and this is the first real decrease. Is it a blip or the start of a decline?
- 2002: $2.1M
- 2003: $6.0M (+ 185.7%)
- 2004: $9.3M (+ 55.0%)
- 2005: $16.0M (+ 72.0%)
- 2006: $25.2M (+ 57.5%)
- 2007: $31.7M (+ 25.8%)
- 2008: $61.3M (+ 93.4%)
- 2009: $169.5M (+ 176.5%)
- 2010: $441.3M (+ 160.4%)
- 2011: $1,092.2M (+ 147.5%)
- 2012: $1,540.0M (+ 41.0%)
- 2013: $1,535.0M (- 0.3%)
- 2014: $1,600M (+ 6.7%)
- 2015: $1,400M (- 12.5%)
Note that the AAP no longer gives as much detail on sales (they want you to pay for exact figures), so the totals for the last 2 years are rounded to the nearest hundred million dollars.
Just for fun, back in 2013, I predicted a “5–10% increase” for 2014 (actual was +6.7%), so I did pretty well there. I didn’t make a prediction for 2015, but I don’t think I would have expected a decrease of more than 10%. It still marks 5 years in a row of e-book sales of over one billion dollars, and remember this only counts large publisher sales, not self-published e-books, which account for a larger and larger slice of the market. So overall e-book sales may even still be going up.
For adult books, e-book sales were down 9.5%, and children’s & young adult e-book sales were down 43.3%.
Overall trade book sales were $7,186.3M in 2015, up slightly from $7,128.7M in 2014. That would put e-books at about 19.5% of the total.
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