By Leonid Bershidsky
If the media industry needed proof that it moved too quickly to devalue its print products on the way to chasing digital audiences, the book industry has been making a convincing case in the past few years.
The rise of print book sales and decline in ebooks in 2015 was no accident. Last year, the trend continued, and self-publishing in electronic form no longer seemed as good a bet as in previous years. In 2016, the unit sales of printed books in the US increased by 3.3 per cent. That's not unusual, except that in 2016 the publishing industry didn't produce any runaway bestsellers like 2015's The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, and only a handful of books, mostly from previous years, sold more than 1 million copies.
Real (non-digital) books are making a comeback. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
The industry made up that deficiency by selling more non-fiction books. That's an indication of book publishers' overall health: They are flexible and versatile.
If traditional book publishers accepted that the digital revolution meant a total overhaul of their business – the way the music and media industries have largely done – they would be locked in the same race to the bottom that those two industries have faced. The ease of digital self-publishing and readers' sense that digital books should be cheaper than paper ones have resulted in growing unit sales but falling revenues – much like the audiences of major news media have snowballed since the turn of the century without a concurrent growth in revenue.
Book publishers also learnt to be cutthroat competitors, as stand-alone authors are beginning to find out. Publishers can try to prop up ebook prices by driving a hard bargain with electronic retailers, primarily Amazon. And they may have also succeeded in pushing the digital retail giant to shift the attention of its users from from self-published books to those produced by professional publishers.
They cannot, however, explain to readers why an ebook – which is clearly cheaper to produce and, let's face it, not as pleasant to read – should cost about as much as a paper one.
Even in the US, the most mature ebook market in the world, printed books are far more popular than ebooks. The popularity of both formats has been steady since 2014, thanks to older consumers who refuse to leave print behind and younger consumers who seek a more analog lifestyle. Reading a paper book – or listening to vinyl records, whose remarkable comeback continued last year – is a statement, a human being's answer to being increasingly surrounded, and now even threatened, by machines.
Book publishers have kept their paper-based operations and helped their physical distribution networks to stay alive by charging low wholesale prices. They have also maintained a time gap between the paper and digital releases of important books. People seeking a traditional experience have always been able to find it, and they were rewarded for it by being the first to read the industry's best offerings. The printed book ecosystem survived the tech revolution, and it no longer appears to be in danger from it.
Much of the news business fell victim to the tech hype that it helped create. News publishers got sucked into the death spiral and tricked into offering their product free of charge, something they are still in the painful process of overcoming. They bought into the idea that anyone could produce what their customers were paying for when they should have held out the way book publishers did. After all, self-published authors haven't killed off Random House and other big industry players, and bloggers and free websites wouldn't have killed old media companies. Publishers just needed to be more persistent and inventive about selling them.
Of course, the news media had an advertising revenue dependence that cheaper digital ads couldn't feed. Book publishers didn't have that problem. But it's the media's own fault for not trusting readers to pay for good content. Now, the best of them are correcting this mistake.
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist.