January E-Book Sales Double On-Year, Books Sell Less Overall

A general fear for our age is that the populace, in general, reads less than they used to, and a recent analysis of this field, as well as of the e-book segment in particular, appears to confirm this, more or less.

Normally, one would think that a piece of news saying that some market segment or another saw serious growth during a single month could only imply a positive evolution for its parent market.

The e-book market, however, is one of those areas that, although experiencing significant growth, failed to lead to an overall rise in book sales.

Basically, although sales of e-books doubled during January 2011, compared to the same month of 2010, overall book sales, at least in the US, dropped by roughly 2%.

This means that an increasing number of people are choosing electronic books over physical ones, as the former are more affordable and easy to get.

For those that want numbers, net sales of e-books were up 115.8%, meaning that the $32.4 million of January 2010 were overshadowed completely by the $69.9 million.

Meanwhile, all sorts of books put together dropped from last year's $821.5 million to $805.7 million, mostly because of how sharply adult hardcover and paperback sales slid.

The former went from $55.4 million to $49.1 million (-11.3% on year) while the latter sort saw the figure drop from $104.2 million to $83.6 million (-19.7%). Even the adult mass market fell by 30.9%, from $56.5 million to $39 million.

“As AAP reported last month in its December 2010 monthly report and full 2010 analysis, E-book sales have increased annually and significantly in all nine years of tracking the category,” says an AAP report.

All in all, people, at least in the US, are losing interest in reading, and those who still have this pastime are migrating to the electronic medium.