E-book sales fell 10% in first five months of 2015, while print books and bookstores are showing resilience
UPDATE: There is a question as to whether … Andrew Nusca / Fortune : Print books are far from dead. But they're definitely on the decline Daniel Berkowitz / Digital Book World : Ebook Sales Slip and Print Is far from Dead Tyler Lee / Ubergizmo : E-Book Sales Sees A Decline Of 10% In 2015 Tricia Duryee / GeekWire : A new chapter for e-books?: Sales plunge 10% in the first five months of the year Leah Becerra / Gizmodo UK : Print is Back and it's Trouncing E-Book Sales James Warren / Poynter : Brian Williams returns to action Amanda Nelson / BOOK RIOT : Critical Linking: September 23, 2015 Peter O'Kelly / Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check : The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead - The New York Times Tweets: Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : Yes, e-book sales have fallen — because publishers have been determined to keep prices too high: http://www.techmeme.com/... Amanda McGowan / @amandaemcgowan : “The digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule.” E-book sales flagging, print books resilient! http://www.nytimes.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Journalisming: Big publishers raised e-book prices 30-50% and @nytimes barely mentions it as cause of sales drop. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 10% e-book drop lands weeks after Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster reported declining e-book revenues following winning the right to set prices in their deal with Amazon — meaning the publishers exercised their hard-won pricing power just as unit demand softened. The resilience of print books and physical bookstores in the same period suggests readers are trading back rather than leaving books altogether.
The longer arc confirms this wasn't a blip: by 2019, e-books had stabilized at roughly 20% of total sales, often priced above print in the aftermath of Apple's e-book price-fixing settlement, before a pandemic-era digital rebound led by audiobooks reshaped the mix again. This article is the inflection point where 'e-books kill print' stopped being the working assumption.
First-order effects
- Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster face falling e-book volume at the very moment they gained control over e-book pricing, forcing a choice between margin per copy and unit share against Amazon's storefront.
- Independent bookstores and print publishing get an immediate commercial reprieve, since the format substitution narrative that pressured physical retail loses credibility.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's leverage shifts: with publishers setting higher e-book prices, its Kindle ecosystem competes less on cheap e-books and more on device lock-in and Prime bundling, while print distribution becomes relatively more valuable to publishers' revenue mix.
- Publishers' pricing decisions come under renewed regulatory scrutiny, since the post-Apple-settlement environment means every price increase reopens questions about how agency pricing was restored.
Third-order effects
- If e-books plateau near the ~20% share later reported, book publishing settles into a multi-format structure — print for discovery and gifting, digital for convenience, and eventually audiobooks as the actual growth engine — rather than a single winner-take-all format transition.
- Sustained publisher pricing power over digital formats sets the template for how content industries negotiate with platform gatekeepers, with library licensing fights like the $40-per-copy e-book rates emerging as the next battleground over who controls digital access.
The trend: Book publishing is settling into a durable multi-format equilibrium in which digital formats complement rather than replace print, with pricing power and platform terms — not format adoption — becoming the industry's central fight.