You can’t keep a good book down

Andy York is Senior Sales and Marketing Manager at Warners Midlands PLC in Bourne, Lincolnshire – a family-run printing business established in 1926 and now one of the UK’s largest printing companies. For Warners and others like them, the supposed “death of print” is obviously a critical business issue, an Andy acknowledges that digital technology has had a significant impact on certain sectors.

The things that have suffered are daily news, that sort of thing – quick information that is only relevant for a short period. Newspapers have certainly taken a bit of a pasting, because the information they contain is now available in other places, and anything printed is always going to be more behind the times because of the amount of time it takes to get into print. But magazines that are dealing with niche subjects and have good editorial content are really doing quite well

But what of this demise of printed books we keep hearing about?

I’ve heard the same claims for years. But the fact is, if that really were the case, it would’ve happened already. There would be no bookshops, no magazines on the shelves There seems to be a lot of truth in this statement. I have heard the “death of books” claim just about every year since 1990, and yet printed book sales have actually increased by 42%  when digital technology has boomed.

What is new to this mix, however, is the e-book, and the e-reader – Kindles, iPads and their like. In December 2011 Amazon announced that Kindles were selling at the rate of 1 million per week, and by March 2012, Apple announced it had sold 55 million iPads. With that figure predicted to top 100   million by the end of 2013. Christmas 2012 will have seen a whole new generation of cheap e-readers available for for the first time  – from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo, as well as the new iPad mini. If you have an e-reader you need e-books, you don’t need printed books. At least, that’s the theory.  In September 2012 the BBC reported a “huge increase” in the sales of e-books, with sales of e-books for children tripling in the first six months of the year. The previous month, Amazon had announced that sales of Kindle e-books now outstripped its sales of printed books. Such announcements seem to sound the death knell of the printed book. But do they?

Ian Bennett is a freelance designer with wide experience in print production and electronic media, and so is very familiar with both sides of this argument. He lectures in publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, covering everything from typography to internet communications and app creation, and also helped to set up the MA in publishing in conjunction with Cambridge University Press. Recently, he has noted a surprising trend amongst his students

Unscientific surveys conducted by me within the university reveal that the younger generation still prefer to actually hold a piece of reading matter and none of those questioned over the last three years have ever read a book or magazine via a digital platform – they all stated a preference of hard copy. So the situation looks unlikely to alter markedly for the foreseeable future

Next time you’re on a train, try this: look around at the Kindle users and guess their ages  Last time I did this, none, by my reckoning, were under 30 and most were over 50. Amazon’s own figures from the US support Ian’s anecdotal evidence: in 2011 they of the year they reported that 37% were aged 55 and older, 75% 35 and above. 40% of all Kindle users were 40-59 years of age. Fewer than 0.5% were under 25. New technology is so frequently associated with the young that it may come as a surprise to find older generations driving sales of e-readers. These are the people for whom such technology is a novelty, of course. For the young – like little Alice – the situation is quite different.

So, it appears that sales of e-readers and e-books may settle. But how is all this affecting print books? In early 2012, a drop in printed book sales was widely reported, with headlines employing dramatic terms such as “slump”, “nosedive” and “plummet”. Publisher’s Association figures from May 2012 did indeed show print sales down by 7%, although there were also signs that recession was partly to blame (total sales – including e-books – were down 2%). By September, the picture had changed again, with printed book sales reported to be “steady” with a drop of only 0.4% on the previous year.

In addition, announcements by Amazon seemed to suggest that there was a growing hunger for books of all kinds – British Kindle users were apparently buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle, a development Amazon described as “a renaissance of reading”. They also announced that their print business continued to grow, and in May had even gone
into partnership with high street print-book seller Waterstones. So much for the death of the book.