There are few other things more soothing to people of a certain type—myself included—than leisurely browsing their favorite neighborhood bookstore. In San Francisco, my favorite store is Green Apple Books, on 9th Avenue in the Inner Sunset district, right by the Golden Gate Park. Walking between those tall stacks of books under the warm store lights feels reassuring. The faces at the counter are friendly. And you know you're in the presence of others who share in your comfort there. Hiding among the shelves, you think (and you imagine others are thinking), might be your next beloved book, the one you later push onto family and friends, one that freezes some essential idea about the world that you immediately want to share with others.
It’s perhaps because book lovers are so ardent that we tend to gobble up news that makes the claims we want to hear about the future of the medium we hold so dear. "Print is back, ebooks are dead!" is the latest refrain to catch our ears. Bookstores are coming back and, you guys, Amazon isn’t doing that well.
Every one of these claims contains some truth. But for book lovers, embracing them also involves a little bit of wish fulfillment. The book industry is too complicated to distill into any one of those sweeping theses. Print books have persisted, but ebooks are not going away. Amazon is powerful, but physical bookstores are still here. The book is not immune to the powerful digital forces that have re-shaped so much of the rest of the world. At the same time, books have been able to resist the forces of change because books really are different.
For so long, the prevailing narrative held that the digital revolution would completely upend books and bookstores—especially with the introduction of the Kindle in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. Just yesterday, Amazon announced the Kindle Oasis, which looks to be another successful e-reader for the company. But the digital transformation of the book industry has been markedly different from the transformation of other media industries.
“For many people, digital books are not a directly substitutive experience,” says Michael Cader, founder of book industry newsletter and website Publishers Lunch. In other words, an ebook doesn't offer the same experience the way a digital file streamed through headphones is essentially the same, whether it's from a CD or Spotify.
“Physical books are … closer to perfect and affordable technology," Cader says. "The printed book is much, much older than other types of media, and it revolutionized modern society. There was very little about it that needed to be reinvented.”
For that same reason, the stores that sell physical books are not all disappearing. “Independent bookstores have kept surviving or thriving in spite of all the economic rationality of Amazon’s lower prices,” says Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of Green Apple Books. “In the indie channel, there are more and more stores, and sales data seem strong.” At Green Apple itself, Mulvihill says, sales have steadily increased since the most recent recession.
Mulvihill says Green Apple, after nearly four decades in the business, opened a second location in 2014 due in part to people’s seeming rejuvenated eagerness to buy print books. Instead of killing print books, enthusiasm for ebooks seems to have leveled off. In fact, ebook sales fell 10.5 percent to $68 million for the first five months of 2015, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which tracks print and digital book trends. At the same time, according to Publisher’s Weekly, bookstore sales rose 2.5 percent in 2015, the first time sales were up in the sector since 2007. Total bookstore sales in 2015 reached $11.17 billion, compared to $10.89 billion in 2014, according to government data.
But this development isn't new—it’s the continuation of a trend rather than a new development. Growth rates for eBooks dropped in 2012, and have been about flat since 2013. And all those ebook readers didn't just go back to buying books in print: total hardcover sales through May 2015 fell by 11.25 percent ($91 million) down to $718 million. Print is slightly up, with about 571 million paper books sold in the US, a slight increase over the 559 million sold in 2014. But the core area of growth in the category? Nonfiction trade paperbacks, which include the latest fad taking over the nation, adult coloring books, which are inherently a print product.
Part of what complicates trendspotting when comparing ebooks to physical books is what readers tend to voraciously consume on digital devices depends largely on genre. Popular fiction titles, romance, and young adult bestsellers (think The Hunger Games) do better in digital than print, one Big Five publishing executive tells WIRED, while general nonfiction, children’s books and yes, adult coloring books, obviously sell more in print. In general, really popular new books may do better digitally, which makes sense if many people are opting for a quick download in order to keep up with water cooler conversation.
Meanwhile, Amazon has hardly ceased to act as a force in dictating the direction of book publishing. (Apple still only captures about 12 percent of US eBook sales, according to data-scraping website Author Earnings.) As a tech company first, not a publisher, iterating to adapt to changing trends is just the way it does business.
As ebook sales flatten, Cader says the company seems to have taken a sideways approach. It's focusing more of its energies on the self-publishing market and its own imprint. It's also pushing its Kindle Unlimited program, a Netflix-like subscription service for ebooks model that has stymied startups.
As for the future of the bookstore? Amazon itself seems to see one. The company has opened a physical bookstore in Seattle and is reportedly planning to open a second in San Diego this summer. “The idea of a bookstore has not been significantly experimented with or revised since superstores became popular in the pre-digital era 20 years ago,” says Cader. And as big bookstore chains have shuttered (Borders) or faltered (Barnes & Noble), there's new space for experimentation.
With Amazon's rich data on book sales, the company could use its physical bookstores to introduce customers to books they may not have heard of but that do well on its online store, says Peter Hildick-Smith, founder of The Codex Group, which follows the book industry. It could also use its online data to target books by place. “It could be very customized to the local taste,” Hildick-Smith says.
Amazon, after all, started with books because they seemed like the right product for the company to use as an experiment—a test bed for figuring out how commerce could work in the future. Now that Amazon is well into that future, the company is about more than books. But books still may help it reach greater heights.
