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From Digital Book World comes this:

A mini-wave of middling news has hit the e-book world in the past several weeks in contrast to the usual positive narrative about explosive growth and boundless opportunity. Is it a dark cloud on the horizon or just a blip on the radar?

Mixed metaphors aside, what’s really going on with e-books right now? Despite the “bad” news, experts and observers say that e-book publishers have little to worry about.

Profits are down at romance-book publisher and e-book vanguard Harlequin due to print declines that were not offset by digital gains. The Association of American Publishers announced weaker-than-expected adult trade e-book growth in February, the most recent month for which numbers are available. The rate of increase for Simon & Schuster’s digital sales continued to decline, according to the company’s first quarter results. And after a banner fourth quarter 2011, sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire reportedly fell off a cliff in the first quarter of 2012 (which could be good or bad news for e-book publishers, depending on how you look at it).

“I’m not hearing alarm bells from publishers yet,” said James McQuivey, Ph.D. and principal analyst at Forrester who covers the book industry. “So I can’t say whether there is an overall softening or just unevenness in the data or just that each of these things is potentially explainable as due to circumstances specific to the players involved.”

More in the article.  Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Have ebook sales really slowed, or have they just slowed among members of various groups/associations because they’ve shifted a bit to smaller digital pubs and new/backlist self published stuff?

  2. They now include data from 1200 publishers instead of just 90 in 2011 so the numbers should include the smaller publishers. Not sure if there is a way to count the self pubbers due to the various schemes out there ie. KDP Select.

  3. @Tom, but 1,200 publishers is still a tiny amount. I don’t know current numbers, but back in 2004 there were over 85,000 publishers (according to Publishers Weekly). I know they really can’t count self-pubs, but I’d bet some of these ‘slowed sales’ have shifted to said self-pubs.

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