From Publishing Perspectives:
In its release this morning (May 9) of 2017 data from the StatShot tracking program, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) is reporting that overall publisher revenue for the year was flat at US$14.7 billion.
. . . .
An increase of $96 million (1.3 percent) is being cited in trade consumer books, bringing that sector to $7.6 billion in 2017. That change is seen as being centered in adult books where there was a 3-percent uptick in revenue. The adult books category accounts, the AAP says, for more than 65 percent of revenue for trade books.
It’s important to bear in mind that the figures represented in StatShot are described as representing “publishers’ net revenue for the US”–in other words what publishers sell to bookstores, direct to consumers, online venues, and so on. These are not retail or consumer sales figures. Especially in the area of digital products, we remind readers that this compilation of revenue statistics has no sight into the sales action of the major online retailers led by Amazon, of course.
. . . .
In terms of trends, the US publishers’ association cites three key observations, starting with a fifth year of audio growth:
In growth percentage, downloaded audio dominated with 29.7-percent growth compared to 2016. This is the fifth year of double-digit growth for this format, revenue nearly tripling to what it was in 2012
Ebook sales were seen to decline for a third year by 4.7 percent. That’s a much lower rate of decline than has been seen in past years–in 2015 and 2016, the AAP saw double-digit declines for ebooks. And one exception was the reportage from religious presses, which saw a revenue increase in ebooks.
Higher education publishers’ revenue is reported to have been flat in 2017 (an increase of only 0.2 percent. This did, however, follow a decline in the previous year.
Adult books showed an increase over 2016 of $148.1 million
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
Back in the physics business, as a grad student, I remember a common practice with intractable equations was to find some kind of a series representation that was more manageable, and to use a few terms out of the series as a stand-in for the actual equation.
But then I realized that, for this to work properly, each term in the series, as it stretched out to infinity, needed to be smaller than the previous one, so you could cut the series off after a couple of terms.
And I also realized that this process was being used even when the next term in the series was larger than the previous one, and became thoroughly confused. Theoretical people tended to do that IIRC (it’s been a very long time), and thoroughly lost me on ever believing theoreticians. Just because something is mathematically convenient doesn’t mean it’s right.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing: Amazon keeps getting bigger and bigger – and is still ignored in their calculations.
Me wonders what Amazon had to say about a/e/book sales … 😉