Print vs. digital in the book business

Publishers Weekly - After compiling the list of bestselling print books of the year through June 30, according to Nielsen BookScan, PW set out to discover just how well those titles performed as e-books. Based on breakdowns provided by individual publishers, there is yet more evidence that fiction sales lean more toward digital than their nonfiction counterparts.

For fiction, the digital-print split hovered consistently around the 50/50 mark. With excitement over the film adaptation prompting renewed interest in the title, 48% of sales of The Great Gatsby went to e-books in the first six months of 2013. The digital-to-print breakdowns for The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks and The Innocent by David Baldacci were right down the middle, with 50% of sales of each title coming from e-books. The Third Wheel, the seventh in Jeff Kinney’s illustration-heavy Diary of a Wimpy Kid storybook series, presents a notable exception to the pattern, with sales skewing toward physical books. Two Dr. Seuss books—Oh, The Places You’ll Go and Green Eggs and Ham—were among the top 20 bestselling print books through June, but those titles are available in digital form only as apps, not as e-books.

By and large, about 25% of total sales for nonfiction titles on the bestselling print list came from e-books. For both Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven and Shred: The Revolutionary Diet by Ian K. Smith, 25% of sales were digital in the first half of the year. In the Duck Dynasty camp, 18% of sales went to e-books for Happy, Happy, Happy by Phil Robertson, one of the show’s stars, and e-books accounted for 21% of total sales for The Duck Commander Family by costars Willie and Korie Robertson. Although Thomas Nelson didn’t make exact percentages available, the publisher did report that sales for Jesus Calling by Sarah Young were predominantly print. Penguin, Random House, and Tor declined to provide breakdowns.

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