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For the past 30 years or so we have been living in a glorious Paperback Era, with the format responsible for the lion’s share of the book trade’s growth and revenue.
In the 13 and a quarter years we have format data from Nielsen BookScan, paperbacks have accounted for 69% of physical sales by value (£14.5bn of £20.9bn) and 77% by volume (2.1 billion of 2.7 billion units). Heady days indeed.
But in publishing’s Digital Era the paperback’s dominance is under threat. With the e-book, the received wisdom goes, cheap paperbacks will go by the wayside, replaced by even cheaper digital editions, and the physical format to thrive will be beautiful edition hardbacks.
There are some signs that this is true. Paperback sales through BookScan in 2013 dipped below the £1bn point for the first time in a decade, to £939.3m, its lowest annual total since 2001. There was also a 9.1% dip in volume in 2013 versus the previous year.
Yes, 2012 was the year of Fifty Shades, but this was certainly not a one-off. Since 2008—when the one-two punch of digital and the recession began pummelling bricks-and-mortar booksellers—there has been an inexorable decline of the paperback. Over those five years the format has slumped by 23.3% in value terms and dropped by a quarter in volume. British booksellers last year sold 46.7 million fewer paperbacks than they did in 2008, and had their paperback revenues reduced by £285.6m.
A large part of this decline, of course, has been in the mass market heartland of Adult Fiction. Last year’s £263.7m was the BookScan category’s lowest ebb since records began, £16.8m below the previous nadir—2002’s £280.5m.
There is some ammunition for those who say the hardback will prosper as the paperback falters. Hardbacks overall in 2013 declined by the barest of margins, 0.9% to £477.4m, against an overall market fall of 6.5%. Hardback Adult Fiction actually rose in 2013, up 3.4% to £75.6m—£6.5m of which came from Dan Brown’s Inferno (Bantam)—the fourth-best Hardback Adult Fiction total since records began. Meanwhile, for the first time in BookScan history, sales for Hardback Adult Non-Fiction: Trade eclipsed paperback Adult Fiction sales, by £268.8m to £263.7m.
Still kicking
So the paperback is in terminal decline? Is it time to phone Dignitas and pull the plug? Not exactly. The paperback may have dropped in the past five years, but it is worth noting that it is still—by far—the biggest format on the market. In 2013, 66% of all physical sales by value and 77% of print volume were generated by this supposedly terminal format.
Add digital to the mix and paperbacks are still arguably the engine of the trade. In our Review of 2013, The Bookseller estimated that digital accounted for about 74 million units in volume sales, £220m in value. Add those figures to the print total, and paperbacks still accounted for 57% of the trade’s value sales, and 52% of its volume.
It would be fatuous to suggest that a format that delivers 57% of the trade’s domestic revenue will be gone anytime soon, but equally it would be dangerous not to adjust to undoubtedly changing times.
One of the interesting things about paperbacks is that brands and big books are having less of an impact. This cuts across received wisdom, but the fact of the matter is that the top books have a smaller slice of the bookshop pie. In 2013, the top 50 paperbacks generated 4.97% of BookScan’s paperback revenue, a percentage that has fallen steadily in the past decade—barring the Fifty Shades-fuelled 2012. In 2008, the top 50 paperbacks accounted for 5.8% of overall paperback revenue; in 2003 it was 6.6%; in 2001, 8.9%.
Meanwhile, a greater percentage of paperback backlist was sold in 2013 than in the previous five years through BookScan’s TCM Top 5,000. From 2008 to 2012, around a quarter of TCM paperback revenue came from books published in that calendar year (24.7% to 28.1%). In 2013, that figure fell to just 20.4%.
More backlist probably means more profitable shops—or at the very least, it infers that physical books are being sold at less silly discounts: the average selling price for a backlist title in 2013 was £5.62 (26.8% off r.r.p.), compared to £5.04 (a 36% average discount) for a frontlist paperback.
The reasons for this backlist/frontlist shift are undoubtedly complex, but booksellers—and Waterstones in particular—have made noises about investing in backlist. Whether this is the digital tail wagging the bricks-and-mortar dog is difficult to ascertain. As physical shops cannot hope to compete with e-book prices, the decision might be as much about ceding the digital frontlist ground and concentrating on more profitable areas.
Overall, the paperback a.s.p. in 2013 was £6.88, its highest level since 2002. Again, the shifting interplay between digital and physical contributed to this. With fiction migrating heavily to digital, non-fiction—with its heftier prices—is gaining more shelf space. Just over 36% of paperback revenue in 2013 was generated by Adult Non-Fiction: Trade (with its £8.31 a.s.p.), the highest percentage the category has earned since 2008.
Children’s has been the bricks-and-mortar stalwart of the past few years, and that continued in 2013. The Children’s, Young Adult & Educational paperback category did drop 5.5% by value in 2013, but that was almost entirely due to the performance of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books in 2012 and 2013. Children’s contributed 21% to the paperback cause in 2013, its greatest chunk of the overall paperback pie since BookScan records began, helped by a £5.04 a.s.p., the sector’s highest ever.