Right now’s put up is excerpted from the brand new guide Digital Inc. by literary agent Richard Curtis.

However predictions by e-book pioneers of a paperless world; however denunciations by indie anarchists that the feudalist guide enterprise was on the snapping point; however publishers’ struggles to adapt their superannuated trade to a stunning new expertise—the print guide trade didn’t founder. In truth, not lengthy after the primary wave of digital books swept readers up on the finish of the primary decade of the twenty first century, print went on to thrive and thrives to today. In line with Statista, “Print … stays the most well-liked guide format amongst U.S. customers, with 65 % of adults having learn a print guide within the final twelve months.” Whereas ebooks keep a major place on the studying spectrum, they’ve proportionately misplaced floor since their debut early within the 2000s.

What accounts for print’s unshakeable traction? Or to reverse the query, why haven’t ebooks conquered the paper world because the expertise’s progenitors predicted? There are a number of solutions.

My very own idea is that a complete technology of children grew up studying printed books or having them learn to them or deciding on them on visits to the library. Thus, their choice for that format carried over to grownup studying. Within the daybreak of the digital revolution, publishers experimented with hypertext and hotlinks to provide animated books that kids couldn’t solely learn however watch and listen to as nicely. These books “learn” themselves with out parental intervention. The thought was for kids to study to learn on their very own by means of stimulating photos and sounds, vocabulary prompts that pronounced the phrases aloud, photos that moved and danced and flashed. These devices, subsequently referred to as “vooks” (a portmanteau mix of “video” or “digital” and “books”), would liberate mother and father from the duty of serving to their kids to learn and study. In 2009, Vook, a software program platform for the creation of digital video books, was launched.

This was nice in idea, however it failed to acknowledge that few mother and father imagine studying to their kids is an disagreeable job. Fairly the opposite, they love snuggling up with their children and studying collectively. The intimacy of studying a print or image guide to your baby, or having your baby learn to you, can’t be duplicated by self-reading units. As I wrote in 2012, “Although image guide apps and tales that ‘inform’ themselves with out mother and father current are nice enjoyable, they only don’t appear to have the identical enchantment as the nice and cozy physique and acquainted voice of mommy or daddy.” 

It’s debatable (based mostly on two thousand years of human interplay with the codex format) that the tactile expertise of holding and studying a printed guide is superior to the awkwardness (for kids at the very least) of manipulating textual content and photos on a pc.

There was one thing else: Many mother and father sensed that kids don’t profit from studying on display screen as a lot as they do from immersion in print books. A variety of research confirmed that kids are simply distracted by ebooks and don’t retain data the best way they do from printed ones. One such experiment, performed by a workforce headed by Tiffany G. Munzer, MD, Division of Pediatrics, College of Michigan Medical College, confirmed what earlier research had discovered: “much less dialogic interplay between mother and father and preschoolers throughout electronic-book studying versus print.” They concluded:

Mother and father and toddlers verbalized much less with digital books, and collaboration was decrease. Future research ought to look at particular points of tablet-book design that help mother or father–baby interplay. Pediatricians might want to proceed selling shared studying of print books, notably for toddlers and youthful kids.

As kids matured and have become adept with computer systems and cell telephones, the e-book turned an possibility fairly than a necessity, good for some sorts of studying however not the machine of alternative for settling in with an immersive story or researching a paper.

Kids’s choice for guide books (as publishing denizens smilingly name them) over digital ones has carried into the current technology and been handed on to the subsequent one, as evidenced by the perpetually robust marketplace for kids’s books. Although gross sales of grownup books have fluctuated within the twenty-first century, print books for younger readers have held the road and made a revenue 12 months after 12 months. Through the growth years for ebooks of 2008–12, gross sales of print commerce books fell 8.4 % aside from one class: kids’s books. Publishers Weekly famous that in that interval “kids’s/younger grownup had the strongest acquire, with gross sales leaping 117 %, from $215.9 million to $469.2 million.” Gross sales of kids’s books have continued to soar, reaching some $3 billion in 2022.

One other profitable enhance for printed books comes from the realm of pricey particular editions, artistically designed codecs that followers and collectors can show on their bookshelves. Restricted editions have at all times been common within the science fiction style however because the time period “restricted” implies, the printings had been intentionally small to maintain the worth of those uncommon volumes excessive. Nevertheless, within the early 2020s, particular editions turned all the fashion in romance as nicely, with one writer issuing printings exceeding 1,000,000 copies. As Alexandra Alter described them in The New York Instances, “Publishers are investing in colourful patterned edges, metallic foil covers, reversible jackets, elaborate art work on the endpapers, ribbon bookmarks and bonus content material.”

Print’s sustained hardiness was additionally mirrored within the paperback sector. On the bad-news facet, gross sales of the mass market format have been steadily declining over the previous twenty years. Their loss of life discover was not too long ago introduced in Publishers Weekly: “Gross sales of mass market paperbacks have steadily declined in recent times, to the purpose the place they accounted for under about 3 % of models bought at retailers that report back to Circana BookScan in 2024. The format will take one other massive blow on the finish of 2025, when Readerlink will cease distributing mass market paperbacks to its accounts.” ReaderLink describes itself as “the biggest full-service distributor in North America” with six US distribution facilities supplying over 100,000 shops.

The excellent news is that the slack has been taken up by the success of commerce paperbacks. Main publishers are shifting their focus to commerce paperback because the format of alternative each for originals and reprints. Even mass-market paperback publishers that prospered with style literature like romance and science fiction are pushing their chips onto the bigger trim dimension.

This seismic shift is not only a matter of style but additionally displays the drastic change in the best way books are distributed and displayed. The outdated mass market system—month-to-month picks delivered to sweet retailer, grocery, and drugstore racks—has been largely changed by bookstores whose cabinets are higher designed to inventory and show commerce paperbacks. This format is extra economical in reprinting hardcovers as a result of they’re the identical trim dimension and infrequently use the identical cowl. The typical return fee for commerce paperbacks is significantly decrease than the 40 % or extra for mass market paperbacks, as a result of commerce paperbacks have far longer shelf lives.

Commerce paper has turn out to be the popular format for literary originals and reprints of most commerce hardcovers, whereas mass market paperbacks are for essentially the most half reserved for reprints of main bestsellers. (The exceptions are books in genres like science fiction, romance, westerns and horror, which proceed to promote as mass market originals and are carried in big-box shops like Walmart.)

Another excuse for the recognition of commerce paperbacks is that once they exit of inventory, publishers can replenish them utilizing print on demand (POD), which reduces the dangers each of overprinting or underprinting. In truth, print on demand is another excuse why print books have prevailed. Books that used to die after their preliminary printings have an extended, if not infinite, life due to POD expertise. Though the time period “lengthy tail” was invented to explain a considerably totally different enterprise technique, I felt that it utilized completely to the infinite lifetime of digitized books—and to the ability of POD to make area of interest merchandise like specialised books out there to nearly anybody, anyplace.

As for my prediction that the returns-driven publishing enterprise could be supplanted by one based mostly on print on demand, I received it half proper. By 2020, LightningSource, the main on-demand printing firm, had grown right into a $2 billion firm, with 18 million titles in its stock. However the consignment mannequin, that relic of an period when returns had been modest, endures, particularly in terms of blockbuster books, the place economies of scale greater than steadiness losses from returns. Publishers are higher in a position to handle printings, distribution and stock than they had been within the Roaring Nineties. They merely regard losses from returned copies as an inevitable value of doing enterprise and go them alongside to customers within the type of increased listing costs.

One other enhance to the fortunes of printed books was assimilation of the brand new media. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, a younger, technically astute technology of editors had found out how one can apply to guide manufacturing options developed by e-book publishers and self-published authors. The consequence was improved advertising and marketing, focused promoting and publicity, strong social media campaigns, and higher synergy between print and different media, reminiscent of audiobooks. In his 2023 end-of-year message, Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch famous that “greater than half our gross sales happen on digital retail platforms. … With new instruments that observe how typically prospects take a look at a guide web page after which go on to buy the guide, this program encourages our publishing groups to measure and regulate promoting traces, title descriptions, photos and different components of our guide pages with a purpose to drive extra gross sales.”

These enhancements might clarify the paradox that the variety of guide publishing jobs has dramatically declined previously 25 years, from 91,100 in 1997 to 54,822 in 2023, in keeping with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (This statistic doesn’t embody folks employed in self-publishing, which is unimaginable to quantify.) A 2024 Publishers Weekly article by Thad McIlroy and Jim Milliot confirms that “publishing has turn out to be extra environment friendly within the digital age.” But profitability has improved, confirming the sustained power of the normal guide enterprise—what guide developer and agent Philip Turner described as “The Persistence of Print.”

If print books prospered within the twenty-first century, Ebook Expo America, the American guide trade’s greatest annual occasion, ought to have prospered, too. Paradoxically, the convention went into decline and died in 2020. Why? Presumably as a result of BEA was basically an analog island in a digital ocean, fatally gradual to embrace the brand new expertise even throughout the e-book’s most expansive interval from 2009 to 2020. 

The American Booksellers Affiliation conference had began in 1947 however was renamed Ebook Expo America when Reed Exhibitions acquired it in 1995. Unbiased booksellers got here to New York Metropolis from all around the nation and certainly all around the world, to Manhattan’s mammoth Jacob Javits Middle, to “crawl” the aisles and gawk, meet authors, gossip with outdated associates, try traits, accumulate catalogs, seize ARCs (advance studying copies) of massive books and order titles for the approaching season from exhibiting publishers.

But, for all its bookish glamour, BEA simply wasn’t attractive sufficient to take care of its attraction, and attendance started to drop.

BEA lacked the go-go pleasure of digital publishing, which had turn out to be an natural part of the guide trade. The associated fee and trouble of journey to New York Metropolis was additionally an element. Booksellers had been relying an increasing number of on distant technique of learning publishers’ on-line lists (referred to as “e-catalogues”), studying PDFs of forthcoming books, speaking with their gross sales reps and ordering books. Attendance had drastically declined from 13,872 in 2010 (not counting exhibitor personnel) to a mere 8,260 in 2019. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic completed BEA off, because it did so many different in-person occasions.

On-line applications had been substituted, however as a result of the Expo had been fighting attendance and id points anyway (and the variety of days it was open was down to 2), it was determined in 2020 to “retire” BEA till a brand new format and method might be discovered to lure the guide neighborhood again into conference facilities.

BEA was about touring to a geographical locus to have a good time bodily objects, the very definition of an analog occasion. It died of irrelevance. R.I.P. BEA.

Richard Curtis is a number one New York literary agent, publishing authority, e-book pioneer, and authors’ advocate. He was the primary president of the Unbiased Literary Brokers Affiliation and subsequently president of the Affiliation of Authors’ Representatives. Curtis’s fascination with rising media and expertise led to his founding one of many first business e-book publishers, seven years previous to the introduction of the Kindle and the appearance of the E-Ebook Revolution. He’s additionally creator of dozens of works of fiction and nonfiction, the latest of which is Digital Inc. (Rivertowns Books, 2026).