Print vs. Digital Media: Overview

Introduction

During the first decades of the twenty-first century, e-books went from being a small and specialized corner of the publishing industry to dominating the market. First invented in 1971, e-books began to be distributed via the internet in 1993. They gained a huge boost in popularity from Amazon.com's release of its designated e-reader, the Kindle, in 2007. After that, other manufacturers released their own proprietary e-book readers, helping the market grow in subsequent years. By the 2020s audiobooks had also become a popular choice for many readers, although print books remained the most popular choice for readers in the US.

The rapid growth of the e-book market created an uncertain future in terms of book publishing, sales, and even literacy. It may be the case that publishers will eventually seek to raise the prices of e-books to offset the fixed costs traditionally covered by print-book sales. On the other hand, it is possible that e-book readers will demand the same low prices to which they are now accustomed and that prices will be passed on to the shrinking print-book niche. Literacy might be harmed or helped by the switch to digital readership; it is not yet known what impact e-books will have on reading behavior.

Understanding the Discussion

Brick-and-mortar: A brick-and-mortar retailer sells products through physical retail locations. The term is meant to distinguish a vendor from web-based e-commerce companies that use the internet to connect with customers.

E-book: An e-book is a digital version of a book or other written document, readable either on a personal computer or on a designated e-reader. Historically, e-books have been digitized versions of existing printed books, but they are increasingly being created without print counterparts for strictly digital consumption.

E-reader: An e-reader is a device specifically designed to read e-books. Usually about the size, shape, and weight of a paperback book, e-readers can be loaded with many different e-books at the same time, making them more convenient than traditional print books.

Hard copy: A hard-copy book is a traditional bound print book, in either hardcover or paperback format. The term is used to differentiate them from e-books, which are saved in digital rather than printed format.

Print vs. Digital Media History

Digital books, commonly known as e-books, were first conceptualized in 1971 by Michael Hart, who was then a freshman at the University of Illinois. On the Fourth of July of that year, Hart spent the night at the university's computer lab, transcribing the Declaration of Independence into a simple computer format called Plain Vanilla ASCII, which allowed it to be read on any computer. With this relatively simple digitization of the historical document, Hart began what he dubbed Project Gutenberg. Since then, Project Gutenberg, eventually organized as a nonprofit, has continued to digitize books that are in the public domain or otherwise out of copyright, amassing over 70,000 curated titles in its free electronic library by the early 2020s.

In 1993 a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science graduate student named John Mark Ockerbloom adapted this idea to the internet. His online e-book collection is now hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and has an index of over one million e-books in its free collection, of which forty thousand have been personally curated by the Online Books Page. The web-based e-book library format that Ockerbloom created combined the physical convenience of the paperless book format with a smooth internet distribution method. The following year, the traditional paper-format National Academy Press began to experiment with the new web-based e-book technology, making some of its titles available for free online to gauge consumer interest in this new way to obtain and read books. In 1995, the MIT Press followed suit, pioneering the first form of e-book sales by giving customers of select titles a free online version with the purchase of a hard-copy edition.

Also in 1995, a Seattle-based entrepreneur named Jeff Bezos launched an online store, Amazon.com. In 1997, the company's stock began to be publicly traded as AMZN on the NASDAQ market. By 2008, this e-commerce venture had captured a significant percentage of the total book market in North America in terms of units sold. This made Amazon.com as big as its next-largest competitor, the mainly brick-and-mortar book chain Barnes & Noble, and far larger than the third-largest US bookseller at that time, Borders. According to a Credit Suisse report from 2010, as cited in a Business Insider article, Amazon.com became the largest book vendor in North America in 2009, controlling approximately 18 percent of the North American book market. In 2010 it grew even more, taking 22 percent of the market.

Part of the reason for Amazon.com's meteoric rise in rank among North American booksellers was the company's strong focus on e-books starting in 2007, when the company first released its e-book reader, the Amazon Kindle. In the following four years, Amazon.com grew to dominate the e-book market, with over five hundred thousand titles available in this format on their site at that time and a majority control of the e-book market. In 2010, Amazon.com became the first major book retailer to sell more e-book titles than any other category of books.

Amazon's innovations helped drive a shift in reading habits. In 2009, only 1.9 percent of adult Americans owned e-reading devices, but this number grew to 19 percent by January 2012, according to a Pew Internet research study. In 2011 the New York Times reported that Amazon.com's e-book sales, in terms of number of units sold, outpaced all of that company's print book sales, although this trend fluctuated in subsequent years.

E-books offered several cost advantages over print books for publishers and retailers. They could be produced quickly and far less expensively than hard-copy books, requiring computers and coders rather than presses and skilled press operators. They could also be distributed over the internet, saving significant costs associated with shipping and warehousing traditional books. Booksellers were able to offer lower prices for e-books than hard-copy books, and customers became accustomed to these lower prices.

However, e-books still retain many of the costs of regular books, such as paying authors, editors, and marketing staff, along with everything that has historically gone into the pre-press publishing process. Many e-books are digitized copies of books that were first produced as print copies. Digitizing print books is relatively inexpensive because the fixed preproduction costs are covered by sales of the print copies. As e-books begin to be created on their own, rather than existing to offer added value as electronic editions of existing print books, the price advantage that e-books enjoy over hard-copy books could decline.

This would mean that publishers would have to either raise prices on e-books or find alternative ways to cover the costs of their production. One possible scenario for selling e-book-only titles is to engage in price differentiation for personal and institutional use. This has become standard practice with academic journals, which cost far more for institutional buyers such as libraries than for individuals. Unfortunately, libraries themselves are facing significant pressures to lower their budgets and have been attracted to e-books precisely because they are cheaper to purchase, house, and loan. Another scenario is that publishers could produce secondary hard copies of e-books and charge a shrinking and increasingly specialized printed-book readership relatively more for them.

The rise in popularity of e-books soon had an impact on the entire book-publishing industry. From 2009 to 2010, overall e-book sales went up approximately 165 percent, while hard-copy sales climbed by a modest 3.6 percent. This trend is expected to continue, in large part because of the increasingly rapid proliferation of an expanding number of e-book readers, such as Barnes & Noble's Nook, Apple's iPad, and the Kobo eReader. In 2009, only 1.9 percent of American adults were estimated to own e-book readers.

During the 2000s and 2010s, as the e-book format carved out a bigger share of the publishing industry and bolstered Amazon's aggressive takeover of the retail book market, traditional bookstores suffered significant losses. The clearest example of this trend was Borders, the Michigan-based, primarily brick-and-mortar retailer. Borders had traditionally been the third-largest book retailer in North America, trailing behind Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. It came relatively late to the online retail and e-book trades, which many analysts blamed for its financial woes starting in 2008.

In that year, Borders went through a wave of retail-store closings, job cuts, and executive replacements. It also entered into an escalating cycle of debt financing, hoping to stay alive long enough to improve its revenues and market share. However, sales fell far short of targets, and Borders declared bankruptcy in February of 2011. It closed over two hundred of its six hundred stores and attempted to stave off complete closure and liquidation by finding a corporate buyer to take over the company. These efforts proved unsuccessful, and the last Borders stores closed in September 2011.

According to statistics released by the US Census Bureau and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), net book publishing remained mostly stagnant around that time, dipping somewhat from 2008 to 2010 during the recession and rebounding slightly as the economy recovered. However, e-book sales grew from a fairly limited niche to a major part of the roughly $30-billion-per-year retail book market.

Print vs. Digital Media Today

E-books remained popular into the 2020s and generated increased interest from institutions, particularly schools. Already by the mid-2010s, according to data published by the School Library Journal, 66 percent of US schools used e-books for educational purposes. Adoption of e-books and other digital learning materials surged during the early 2020s following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the temporary switch to distance learning in most US school districts. For example, OverDrive Education, a company which specialized in educational e-book distribution and online reading platform management, reported that between early 2020 and mid-2021 it experienced a 139 percent increase in digital books assigned or borrowed from the platform's digital collections. Even as the acute phase of the pandemic waned during the early 2020s, some state governments continued to set aside funding to help purchase devices students could use to read e-books.

In addition to e-books, other ways of digitally consuming books, namely audiobooks, also generated increased interest from consumers during the 2010s and 2020s. As it did with e-books, Amazon also became a major played in the audiobook market with its listening platform known as Audible, which in 2023 led the audiobook market and had over 50 million paying subscribers. However, the company also faced competition from other book distributors as well as audio streaming platforms, including Spotify, and audiobooks remained less profitable than print books.

Although e-books remained popular in the early 2020s—in 2021 nearly one in three people in the US reported reading at least one e-book in the previous twelve months, according to a survey published in 2022 by Pew Research Center—sales of print books also remained robust at that time and earlier predictions of total market domination by e-books did not materialize. The same Pew Research Center survey found that 65 percent of people in the US had read a print book in the previous year, more than double the number of reported e-book users.

The continued popularity of print books was reflected in sales figures from across the publishing industry; in 2023 the Association of American Publishers reported that hardcover and paperback book sales totaled $5.3 billion for the first ten months of that year. This figure represented roughly 70 percent of the publishing industry's revenue up to that point in 2023 and dwarfed revenue earned from sales of e-books, which were also less popular in terms of number of units sold.

Other factors also helped prop up sales of print books in the midst of major industry disruptions, including the continued popularity of independent bookstores. After struggling to compete with large chains such as Barnes & Noble during the final decades of the twentieth century and then struggling to compete with online retailers such as Amazon, by the 2020s independent bookstores had begun to enjoy something of a revival in the US. Notably, as reported in 2022 by the New York Times, roughly three hundred new independent bookstores opened in the US in the previous few years.

By the 2020s, as e-books enjoyed an established position in the publishing industry, some things about the long-term benefits or downsides of the adoption of e-books remained uncertain. For instance, the lasting impact of the switch to e-books on overall reading rates remained unclear. Some who preferred traditional print books over e-books felt that consumers' decreasing dependence on print books could leave future generations of readers with fewer experiences with traditional book reading and lead to even further drops in literacy. On the other hand, others argued that e-books read on designated e-readers could help reverse declining interest in reading among young people. Indeed, many young people who struggle with book reading are avid online readers, and distributing books in a more familiar electronic format might make them more accessible to computer-savvy young people.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

Bibliography

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