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The terms ‘electronic book’, ‘e-book’ and ‘ebook’ came into general circulation in the 1980s. The American computer scientist and specialist in computer graphics Andries van Dam is usually credited with coining the term ‘electronic book’, though related work on the characteristics of electronic document systems was being done as early as the 1960s by Theodore Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and others.² The creation of the first actual ebook is usually attributed to a chance event in July 1971. Michael Hart, a freshman at the University of Illinois, decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University’s Materials Research Lab rather than walk home and then have to return the next day.³ On the way to the Lab, he stopped at a shop to pick up some groceries for the night ahead, and when they packed the groceries they put in the bag a faux parchment copy of the US Declaration of Independence. That night at the Lab, Michael was fortuitously given a computer operator’s account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time – 100 million dollars’ worth – credited to it. As he unpacked his groceries, thinking about what to do with all that computer time, the faux parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence fell out of the bag, and that gave him an idea: why not type in the Declaration of Independence and make it as widely available as possible? That was the beginning of Project Gutenberg. The plan was to find books and documents in the public domain that would be of general interest, key them into the computer and make them available in the simplest electronic form possible – ‘Plain Vanilla ASCII’ – so that they could be easily shared. A book would be turned into a continuous text file instead of a set of pages, with capital letters used where italics, bold or underlined text appeared in the printed text. After typing in the Declaration of Independence, Michael typed in the Bill of Rights and a volunteer keyed in the US Constitution, followed by the Bible and Shakespeare, one play at a time. And so the process continued, text by text, and eventually, by August 1997, Project Gutenberg had created 1,000 ebooks, ranging from the King James Bible and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to La Divina Commedia, in Italian.

Project Gutenberg was, and remains, an open archive of ebooks that can be downloaded for free, but, in the course of the 1990s, many publishers also began to explore the possibility of making some of their books available as ebooks. The main difference between initiatives like Project Gutenberg and the first forays of publishers into the emerging world of ebooks was that publishers were dealing for the most part with material that was under copyright, rather than public-domain documents, and hence publishers had to ensure that they had the right to release their titles in an electronic format before they actually did so. This was not a straightforward matter since, prior to around 1994, most publishers’ contracts did not include any mention of ebooks, electronic formats or digital editions – this simply wasn’t envisaged as a format that publishers might want to exploit at some point, so no explicit provision for this format was made in the contracts that publishers negotiated and signed with authors and agents. This changed around 1994: from this point on, many publishers did add to their contracts an explicit provision for electronic formats or digital editions. The specific wording of the clauses, the ways in which revenues would be split and the timing of these contractual changes varied from publisher to publisher, and, even at the same publisher, varied over time – Random House introduced the first changes to their contracts in 1994, others followed suit later. However, for all those books for which contracts had been signed prior to 1994, publishers who wished to release electronic editions had to go back to authors, agents and estates and seek to negotiate an addendum to the original contract that would give them the explicit right to release an electronic edition of the work. Even when authors were amenable, this was a time-consuming and laborious process. Moreover, given the uncertainties surrounding the digital revolution and its potential impact on the publishing industry, it was also a contentious and conflict-ridden process in some cases, as the various parties tried to use whatever leverage they had to negotiate new and better terms in a context where previous norms for print editions could not necessarily be construed as a reliable guide.

And then there was the non-trivial issue of how a book released in an electronic format would actually be read. Texts could, of course, be read on desktops and laptops, and various dedicated reading applications were available for these devices; but desktops and laptops lacked the convenience and portability that many readers had come to associate with the print-on-paper book. A variety of portable, hand-held devices and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, and software was made available for reading ebooks on these devices, but the screen sizes were typically small and the resolutions were relatively poor. In 1998, the first two dedicated ebook readers were released in Silicon Valley: the Rocket eBook, a paperback-size device that held 10 books, weighed a pound and cost $270, was released by Nuvomedia in Palo Alto; and the SoftBook, which held 250 books, weighed 3 pounds and cost around $600, was released by SoftBook Press in Menlo Park. While the devices were innovative and attracted a lot of attention, they sold poorly (less than 50,000 units between them). In 2000, both Nuvomedia and SoftBook Press were acquired by Gemstar, a large technology company that developed interactive programme guide technology for cable and satellite television providers. The Rocket eBook and the SoftBook were phased out and replaced in November 2000 by two versions of the new Gemstar eBook, one with a black and white screen and the other with colour, manufactured by RCA under licence to Gemstar. But, again, sales were disappointing, and in 2003 Gemstar stopped selling ebook readers and ebooks.

Numerous other reading devices appeared and disappeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s – enough to fill a small museum of now-defunct consumer technology. But the first real breakthrough came in April 2004 when Sony launched the Librié 1000-EP in Japan, which was the first reading device to use e-ink technology. Unlike backlit screens, e-ink uses reflected light to simulate the appearance of a printed page. The screen is filled with tiny capsules containing charged pigment; when the electrical charge applied to each capsule is adjusted, its appearance changes, thereby altering the display and producing a page of text. The screen holds that display until the charge is adjusted again to produce a new page of text. E-ink is much gentler on the eye than backlit screens and is easy to read in direct sunlight; it is also very economical in terms of battery use, since electricity is used only when the page is changed. The Sony Reader was launched in the US in October 2006, selling at around $350 and capable of holding 160 books, and ebooks could be purchased from Sony’s own ebook library which offered up to 10,000 titles.

The Sony Reader was a major advance, but it was the Amazon Kindle, released a year later in November 2007, that was the real game-changer. Like the Sony Reader, the Kindle used e-ink technology rather than backlit screens; but, unlike Sony, Amazon used wireless 3G connectivity, free for the user, to enable readers to download ebooks directly from Amazon’s Kindle Store. Readers could now buy ebooks directly from their reading device, without having to use their computer to go online to download the ebook and then transfer it to their reading device via a USB cable. Now, buying ebooks was as easy as a single click. The first Kindle retailed at $399 and was capable of holding 200 books, and the Kindle Store claimed to stock 90,000 titles, including most of the books on the New York Times bestseller list. When the Kindle was released on 19 November 2007, it sold out in five and a half hours and remained out of stock for five months – though what exactly that meant in terms of actual sales remains a mystery because Amazon never disclosed how many they produced. In 2009, Amazon released the Kindle 2, a slimmer version with much more internal memory, capable of holding around 1,500 books, and it reduced the price to under $300. (The development of the Kindle is examined in more detail in chapter 5 below.)

By late 2009, Amazon faced new competition from Barnes & Noble, which launched its own ebook reader, the Nook, in November 2009. Barnes & Noble had been an early entrant in the online marketplace for books, having created an online bookstore, barnesandnoble.com, in 1997, two years after Amazon went live, but barnesandnoble.com struggled to compete with its more creative and efficient rival; the launch of the Nook was Barnes & Noble’s attempt to gain a foothold in the emerging ebook market and to compete head-to-head with the Kindle. Like the Kindle, the Nook used e-ink technology and wireless 3G connectivity to enable readers to buy ebooks directly from the Barnes & Noble store. The Nook retailed at $259 – the same price to which Amazon had reduced the Kindle 2 in October 2009. A year later, Barnes & Noble released the Nook Color, equipped with a 7-inch full-colour LCD touchscreen and priced at $249. Although Barnes & Noble was a relatively late entrant in the e-reader marketplace, it had one important advantage that it exploited to the full: the company had over 700 retail bookstores across the US and it devoted prime space in many of these stores to exhibit, demo and hand-sell the Nook. And, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble already had a large and established customer base of readers who were accustomed to buying books from its stores.

When Apple finally entered the ebook market with the launch of the first iPad in April 2010, they were entering a market in which the two largest book retailers in the US, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, already had major stakes. What Apple did, however, was to integrate the ebook reading experience into the environment of an ultra-stylish, state-of-the-art, multi-purpose tablet computer with a high-resolution LCD touchscreen. Unlike the Kindle and the Nook, the iPad was not a dedicated reading device, but it offered users the option of reading ebooks by downloading an iBook app from the App Store, which displays ebooks and other content that can be purchased from Apple’s iBookstore. The iPad proved hugely successful: 3 million devices were sold in the first eighty days, and by the time the iPad 2 was launched in March 2011, more than 15 million iPads had been sold worldwide. The iPad was much more expensive than the Kindle or the Nook (the initial models were selling for between $499 and $829, depending on the capacity and functionality), but this was much more than a reading device: with the iPad, books entered a new world in which reading was just one of the many things you can do on a small, portable computer, and where the potential for creating new kinds of content, capable of being read and consumed in new kinds of ways, far exceeded anything that had been possible on the Kindle, the Nook and other dedicated reading devices.

The appearance of a new generation of reading devices that were much more stylish and user-friendly than the ebook readers of the early 2000s, coupled with the aggressive promotion of ebooks by major booksellers with large and established clienteles, were the critical factors that underpinned the dramatic upsurge in ebook sales from 2008 on. This remarkable pattern of growth can be seen in table 1.1 and figure 1.1, which show overall ebook sales for trade books in the US between 2008 and 2012.⁴ In the period up to 2006, ebook sales had remained very low and largely static – probably under $10 million. This was a tiny proportion, a small fraction of 1 per cent, of a sector in which total annual sales were around $18 billion. Ebook sales showed some growth in 2006 and 2007, thanks in part to the Sony Reader, but by the end of 2007 ebook sales were still well under $50 million. But from 2008 on, ebook sales began to increase dramatically, reaching $69 million in 2008 – the first full year of the Kindle – and jumping to $188 million in 2009, an increase of nearly 3-fold in one year. By 2012, ebook sales had reached over $1.5 billion, a 22-fold increase in just four years. This was dizzying growth.

Table 1.1 US ebook revenue for trade books, $ millions, 2008–2012

2008	69.1
2009	187.9
2010	502.7
2011	1095.1
2012	1543.6
Source: Association of American Publishers

Figure 1.1 US ebook revenue for trade books, 2008–2012

Source: Association of American Publishers

For the large trade publishers in the US, the surge in ebook sales meant that a growing proportion of their revenue was being accounted for by ebooks rather than traditional print books, whether hardcover or paperback. Although the precise figures varied from house to house, the overall pattern of growth of ebook sales as a percentage of overall revenue during the period from 2006 to 2012 looked roughly like figure 1.2. For many large US trade publishers, ebooks accounted for around 0.1% of overall revenue in 2006 and 0.5% in 2007; in 2008, this grew to around 1%; in 2009, this was up to about 3%; by 2010, it had risen to around 8%; by 2011, it was around 17%; and by 2012, it had risen to between 20 and 25%, depending on the publisher and the nature of their list. It was no longer a negligible figure – far from it.

Figure 1.2 Ebook sales as a percentage of total revenues of major US trade publishers, 2006–2012

Source: Association of American Publishers

The steep rise in ebook sales in the four years from 2008 to 2012 was dramatic and unsettling for many in the industry: after several years during which the much-heralded ebook revolution seemed like a false dawn, suddenly it was an uncontestable reality. Moreover, given the staggering rate of growth, there was no telling where this would end. It’s not hard to see that, if you were a publisher watching this take place around you in 2010, 2011 and 2012, you really would be wondering what was going to happen to your industry. You might even be panicking. You would almost certainly be wondering if publishing was going to go the same way as the music industry. Would ebook sales keep growing at this dramatic rate and become 40 or 50 per cent of your business, maybe even 80 or 90 per cent, in a few years’ time? Were books heading in the same direction as CDs and vinyl LPs – on a precipitous downward slope and likely to be eclipsed by digital downloads? Was this the beginning of the end of the physical book? These were the questions in the minds of most people in the industry at the time – they were seriously worried, and understandably so.

But then something equally dramatic happened: the growth suddenly stopped. It levelled off in 2013 and 2014 and then began to decline. No one at the time had expected this – even the most unswayable sceptics were surprised by this sudden reversal of fortune. In 2013, ebook sales did not continue their meteoric rise but actually fell slightly – from $1,543 million in 2012 to $1,510 million in 2013, a decline of 2.1%, as shown in table 1.3 and figure 1.3. Ebooks showed a small increase in 2014 and then fell more sharply in 2015, down to $1,360 million, a decline of 15%, which was matched by a similar decline in the following year. Figure 1.3 also shows the rate of growth from one year to the next. It shows that the rate of growth was extremely high in 2009 and 2010, around 170% each year, but then the rate of growth began a steep decline until it reached a number just below zero in 2013. After a small increase in 2014, the rate of growth remained negative from 2015 to 2018.

Table 1.2 Ebook sales as a percentage of total revenues of major US trade publishers, 2006–2012

2006	0.1
2007	0.5
2008	1.1
2009	2.9
2010	7.6
2011	17.3
2012	23.2
Source: Association of American Publishers

Table 1.3 US ebook revenue for trade books and rate of growth of ebook sales, 2008–2018

	Revenue ($ millions)	Rate of growth (%)
2008	69.1
2009	187.9	171.9
2010	502.7	167.5
2011	1095.1	117.8
2012	1543.6	41
2013	1510.9	–2.1
2014	1601.1	6
2015	1360.5	–15
2016	1157.7	–15
2017	1054.3	–8.9
2018	1016.1	–3.6
Source: Association of American Publishers

Figure 1.3 US ebook revenue for trade books and rate of growth of ebook sales, 2008–2018

Source: Association of American Publishers

If we then look at print books and ebooks as percentages of total sales (table 1.4 and figure 1.4), we can see that ebooks level off at 23–24% in 2012, 2013 and 2014 and then begin to decline, falling to around 15% in 2017 and 2018. Print books, on the other hand, continue to account for the lion’s share of sales, falling to around 75% of total sales in 2012, 2013 and 2014 but then rebounding, rising to between 80 and 85% from 2015 to 2018.

Table 1.4 Print books and ebooks as percentages of total US trade sales

	Print books	Ebooks
2008	98.9	1.1
2009	97.1	2.9
2010	92.4	7.6
2011	82.7	17.3
2012	76.8	23.2
2013	76.6	23.4
2014	75.9	24.1
2015	79.3	20.7
2016	83.2	16.8
2017	84.3	15.7
2018	85.3	14.7
Source: Association of American Publishers

Figure 1.4 Print books and ebooks as percentages of total US trade sales

Source: Association of American Publishers

And if we then extract the ebook percentages and reformat the vertical scale of this graph (figure 1.5), we can see that the growth of ebooks during this period displays the pattern of the classic technology S-curve: adoption is slow at the beginning, it then takes off and grows rapidly when there is a breakthrough of some kind, and then levels off when the market has been saturated or the limits of performance have been reached. In some cases, the S-curve may decline after this point as the technology no longer improves, alternative technologies appear that steal market share, novelty fades or demand wanes for other reasons. In the case of ebooks, the take-off occurred in 2008–9, following the introduction of the Kindle, and sales rose steeply until 2012 when they levelled off and then fell back.

Figure 1.5 Ebooks as percentage of total US trade sales, 2008–2018

Source: Association of American Publishers

Of course, this does not mean that ebook sales in US trade publishing will remain at around 15 per cent in the future, or will continue to decline, or will never rise above this level – we simply don’t know what will happen in the future. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the dramatic growth that followed the introduction of the Kindle in November 2007 was short-lived, and it came to an abrupt halt in 2012. While the future is unpredictable, it would be a bold soul who, knowing what we now know, suggested that mainstream trade publishers were likely to experience a strong resurgence of ebook sales in the near future – the numbers could fluctuate from year to year, affected by various factors, but, given the evidence to date, a strong and sustained resurgence seems unlikely.