If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t trust experts or establishment media. Independent journalists and internal whistleblowers caught Google manipulating search results around the 2016 election. More than one online consumer revolt disclosed that journalists maintain secret email lists to collude on disinfo ops.
All of which makes it increasingly tiresome to see people in the dissident scene falling for old oldpub zombie memes.
Google “What percentage of the book market are eBooks?” and you’ll get this:
Why anyone would trust Google is beyond me, but it still happens for some reason. Sure enough, a little digging into the subject reveals that the 19 percent figure comes from market research firm NDP.
First, even by their own skewed sample, NDP reports that eBooks make up forty-four percent of all adult fiction sales.
Second, the American Association of Publishers that the decline in eBook sales significantly slowed during the same period covered by NDP.
But even that’s a moot point, since both NDP and AAP track only book sales by the Big Four New York publishers.
Once again, the deception lies in what the experts aren’t telling you.
According to independent market research site Author Earnings, which examined the same sales period as AAP ad NDP before it closed up shop, the latter outlets’ highly selective sampling left out roughly two-thirds of US eBook purchases and perhaps half of all dollars spent on eBooks.
Which means the US eBook market really looks more like this:
Current eBook sales might be even higher than in 2017. That’s because audio books had started cutting into eBook sales.
Yes, those are oldpub figures, but that drives the point home even harder. Oldpub has indeed seen a decline in eBook sales. Much of that decrease was self-inflicted due to price gouging, but more recently, audio had been cannibalizing eBook sales.
And then the lockdowns happened, and people were laid off or switched to working from home.
Now, some indie authors have reported print book sales picking up the slack left by the audio decline. But being anecdotal evidence, I can counter with my own anecdote, which is that eBooks still account for something like 90% of my business.
