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What, if anything, does the experience of ebook sales since 2008 tell us about the likely impact of the digital revolution on the form of the book? Does it suggest that the digital revolution, by separating the symbolic content of the book from the print-on-paper medium in which it was traditionally embedded, has liberated the book from the constraints that were imposed on it by the medium of print and paved the way for a thorough re-invention of the book as a textual entity that displays very different characteristics from the entity we have come to know as ‘the book’? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many who speculated that the book would be re-invented in this way, that the very form of the book – that is, the way in which the text was organized, typically as a work of a certain length arranged as a sequence of chapters, etc. – could be and would be radically reworked in the digital age when the constraints imposed by the medium of print would fall away. One well-known example of this kind of thinking is Robert Darnton’s pyramid model of the scholarly book: a book no longer written as a straight linear text but constructed in multiple layers where the linear text is merely the top layer of a complex digital architecture that contains many more layers, enabling the reader to tack back and forth between a summary account on the surface and rich layers of documentation and illustrative material in the layers below.⁹ There are many examples in the world of trade publishing too: the digital book conceived of no longer as a capsule of content that can be embedded in a physical form of 200 or 300 pages of printed text, but rather as a book that exists entirely and exclusively in the digital medium, a book that is born digital and exists digitally sui generis. It may never have a physical equivalent, or, if it does, the physical book may be but a partial and subsequent realization, in print-on-paper, of content that was conceived of in relation to, and created for, a digital medium.

In the next chapter, we’ll look in detail at some of the attempts that have been made in the world of trade publishing to re-invent the book as a digital entity and examine what came of them, but here I want to reflect on what we can learn from the pattern of ebook sales at mainstream trade publishers from 2008 to the present: does this pattern suggest that the form of the book is being re-invented in the digital medium? Or does it suggest that the digital medium has provided publishers with just another format in which the book, which remains largely unchanged in terms of its organizational features, can be packaged and made available to readers?

My view is that what we have witnessed so far is not so much the invention of a new form of the book, as some of the more radical proponents of the ebook revolution promised, but rather the creation of a new format for the book, which, in terms of its basic organizational features, has remained largely unchanged by the digital revolution. The creation of a new format is certainly not insignificant and it has major implications for the book publishing industry and the many players within it. But it is nowhere near as disruptive as it might have been – or could conceivably still be – if the very form of the book were being re-invented. Let’s explore this distinction a little further.

By the ‘form’ of the book, I mean the way that the symbolic content that makes up the book is structured – e.g., as a sequence of chapters organized in a certain way, extended in length, etc. The ‘format’ of the book is the way that the book is packaged and presented to readers; the same book, structured in the same way, can be packaged and presented in multiple different formats without altering its form. (I elaborate this distinction in more detail in chapter 12.) To say that the digital revolution so far has created a new format for the book but has not changed its form is to say that, for the most part, books remain structured in the same way as they were prior to the digital revolution, but that they are now being packaged and presented to readers in new ways: that is, in a new format – the ebook.

The history of book publishing has been characterized repeatedly by the invention of new formats (or the relaunching of formats previously invented). The classic example of this was Allen Lane’s launching of a new series of cheap sixpenny paperbacks in the 1930s. These were books previously published by other publishers as hardbacks – typically at 7s 6d for a novel, and 12s 6d for a biography or history book – licensed by Allen Lane and reissued in a cheap paperback edition, priced at a mere sixpence, as part of a new series with a distinctive and recognizable brand: Penguin. The paperback itself, as a physical object, was not invented by Lane – paperback books had existed in the late nineteenth century and before, though they were generally regarded as ‘a lower form of life’.¹⁰ Part of Lane’s genius was to rebrand the paperback as a stylish new format that occupied a legitimate and valued position in the marketplace and in the life-cycle of the book. ‘We aimed at making something pretty smart, a product clean and as bright as two pins, modern enough not to offend the fastidious high-brow, and yet straightforward and unpretentious’, reflected Lane.¹¹ He had sensed an emerging market – an expanding middle class with a degree of disposable income and an interest in reading good books if they were priced affordably – and he created a new and effective way of repackaging books to serve this market.

Not that it was all plain sailing. Lane faced much resistance at the time, especially from publishers and booksellers who felt that pricing books so cheaply would only result in people spending less money on books. ‘Nobody can live off sixpenny books’, remarked Charles Evans of Heinemann. ‘Nobody makes any money out of them except the Penguin publishers and possibly their printers.’¹² Evans refused to license Enid Bagnold’s bestselling novel National Velvet to Penguin, despite repeated pleas by the author. But over time the inexpensive paperback edition championed by Allen Lane and epitomized by Penguin would establish itself as a legitimate format – that is, as another way in which the same content can be repackaged, re-priced and delivered to the consumer.

The paperback format subsequently morphed into three separate formats with different dimensions and properties. The A format, 110 mm × 178 mm, commonly called the mass-market paperback, is typically used for books aimed at a wide readership; they are printed on cheap paper, sold at low prices and distributed through a wide range of retail outlets, including supermarkets and drug stores as well as bookstores. The B format, slightly larger in size at 130 mm × 198 mm, is used for more literary authors, while the C format, at 135 mm × 216 mm, is the same size as many hardbacks. Both B- and C-format paperbacks are typically printed on a higher-quality paper and sold at higher price points than the mass-market paperbacks; both are commonly referred to as trade paperbacks, to distinguish them from the mass-market paperbacks in the A format.

When there is more than one format available for delivering the same content to consumers and the pricing of the formats varies significantly, then the timing or phasing of the formats becomes important – in the business, this is known as ‘windowing’. In Anglo-American trade publishing, a book could potentially move through three phases or windows: it would typically start life as a trade hardback, with a list price in the region of $25–$35, depending on the size and the kind of book it is. Around 12–18 months later, it might be released as a trade paperback in a B or C format, depending again on the type of book, and priced in the region of $14–$17. And then, depending again on what kind of book it is, it could subsequently be released as a mass-market paperback in A format and priced under $10. But not all books follow this pattern: a book could go from a trade hardback to trade paperback and never be released as a mass-market paperback; or it could go from trade hardback directly into mass-market paperback; or it could be published initially as a trade paperback (a ‘paperback original’, as it’s sometimes called), without being published in hardback at all – there are many possible permutations. The publisher can use these different formats to maximize revenues and margins, target the book at different readerships and prolong the selling life of the book.

In the period from 2008 to 2012, when ebooks were taking off in Anglo-American trade publishing, it wasn’t clear whether ebooks would eclipse print books altogether, at least in some categories, and, if they did, what implications that would have for the form of the book – whether it would open the way for books to be reconfigured in some fundamental way. As it turned out, however, ebooks remained tied to print books – ebook files were just another output of the production process, along with the print-ready files that were produced for the printer. The content was essentially the same; what differed was the packaging, the delivery mechanism and the price. Many publishers experimented with creating ebooks in which the content was modified in some way – we’ll examine some of these experiments in the next chapter – but for the most part these experiments proved unsuccessful and the kind of ebook that came to prevail was the ebook that replicated the content of the print book but made it available as a digital file to be read on a screen, rather than as a print-on-paper book. In other words, the ebook became another format.

If indeed it is the case that ebooks are another format rather than a new form of the book, then the implications of this for the publishing industry are significant. Publishers know how to work with formats: there is nothing new, as we have seen, about the invention of new formats, and, despite initial resistance and anxieties that may run high, they are generally adept at integrating new formats into the array of options that are available to them to package and deliver their content to consumers. Ebooks simply become another revenue stream into which publishers can tap, in precisely the same way that, in previous decades, they tapped into the new revenue streams created by cheap paperback editions, whether these were mass-market paperbacks or trade paperbacks.

But if ebooks are best understood as another format, as I believe they are, then it is also important to see that this is a new format that comes with an array of special features, some of which have real advantages for publishers. First and foremost, the cost of sales is much lower than for printed books because nothing has to be printed and stored in a warehouse and there are no shipping costs (although there are real distribution costs, a fact often overlooked by those outside the industry). Just as importantly, there are no returns – that wasteful aspect of the traditional trade publishing supply chain simply doesn’t exist in the ebook world. Prices are typically lower and royalties are typically higher on ebooks, but the savings more than compensate for the lower prices and higher royalties, with the result that publishers’ profitability improves. Moreover, the shopping experience is now 24/7 and readers can get books virtually instantaneously if they’re happy to read them on a screen – no need to wait for a bookstore to open or wait for a book to be delivered by post.

We find some support for the idea that ebooks are a new format (rather than a new form) if we look at the sales patterns of ebooks in relation to print formats at Olympic. Table 1.7 and figures 1.11a and 1.11b show sales by book format at Olympic in the period between 2006 and 2016, first by units and then by dollars, as a percentage of total sales. What these figures show is that the steep rise of ebooks in the period between 2008 and 2012 was accompanied by a substantial decline in the sales of mass-market paperbacks, both by units and by dollars: mass-market paperbacks declined from 24% of units and 15% of revenue in 2006 and 2007 to a mere 10% of units and 6% of revenue in 2016. By contrast, neither the hardback nor the trade paperback formats experienced such severe decline. Hardcover units remained fairly stable at around 25%; they dipped in 2012 to as low as 18% but then recovered, returning to 25% in 2015 and rising to 32% in 2016 – higher than it had been at any time in the previous decade. Hardcover revenue was accounting for 40% of overall revenue in 2006; this fell to 25% in 2012 but then rebounded to 32% in 2015 and 43% in 2016 – again, higher than it had been at any time in the previous decade. Trade paperback unit sales declined from 40% in 2008 to 33% in 2013 but then rebounded, climbing back up to 38% by 2016. Similarly, trade paperback dollar sales declined from 37% in 2008 to 27% in 2013, rising back to 31% in 2016.

Table 1.7 Sales in percentages by format, units and dollars at Olympic, 2006–2016

	Ebooksunits	Ebooks$	Hardcoverunits	Hardcover$	Trade paperbackunits	Trade paperback$	Mass marketunits	Mass market$
2006	0	0	24	40	38	35	24	15
2007	0	0	23	36	38	37	24	15
2008	0	1	24	38	40	37	23	15
2009	2	3	26	41	39	35	20	13
2010	6	9	23	36	40	35	18	12
2011	16	19	22	33	36	30	14	9
2012	22	26	18	25	39	35	10	6
2013	21	24	23	32	33	27	11	7
2014	20	24	22	29	36	30	10	7
2015	20	23	25	32	33	28	9	6
2016	20	20	32	43	38	31	10	6

Figure 1.11a Sales in percentages by format and units at Olympic, 2006–2016

Figure 1.11b Sales in percentages by format and dollars at Olympic, 2006–2016

The data from Olympic show pretty clearly that the rise of ebooks has eroded the markets for paperbacks, both trade and mass market, but that it has hit mass-market paperbacks particularly hard: in the decade when ebooks rose from virtually nothing to 20% of Olympic’s revenue, the share of Olympic’s revenue accounted for by mass-market paperback’s fell from 15% to 6%. The decline of the mass-market paperback is not a new phenomenon: mass-market paperback sales have been falling since the 1980s, their market undermined by various factors, including the heavy discounting of hardcover editions by the book superstore chains and the mass merchandisers. Why wait a year for the mass-market paperback of a new novel by James Patterson or Nora Roberts if you could buy the hardcover as soon as it’s published for less than $20? But the rise of ebooks has driven a few more nails into the coffin of the mass-market paperback.

To understand why ebooks have had a differential impact on print formats and have hit mass-market paperbacks particularly hard, we have to return to the point about windowing. In the world of print, the different formats of trade publishing are typically windowed: books are first published as hardcover at relatively high price points, and then brought out a year or so later as a paperback, either trade or mass market, at significantly lower price points. Windowing segments consumers into those who are willing to pay a higher price to get a new book quickly, on the one hand, and those who are willing to wait a year or more to get the book at a significantly lower price. But ebooks are typically not windowed: they are usually published at the same time as the first print edition, though typically at a lower price than the print edition. Some attempts were made by publishers to window ebooks in the early stages of the ebook take-off, in 2009 and 2010, partly as a way of trying to minimize the cannibalization of hardcover sales, but these attempts didn’t last long – publishers came under enormous pressure from ebook retailers, including Amazon and Apple, to abandon ebook windowing, and all of the major publishers soon did. But the fact that ebooks were now available at the same time as the first print edition was published, and generally priced below the print edition, meant that the windowing rationale for the remaining print editions was now significantly weakened. Why wait a year or more for a cheaper paperback edition if a cheaper edition was available at the same time as the hardcover edition, albeit in a digital format? In format terms, it was the cheaper paperback editions, released at later dates and lower price points, that were hardest hit by the non-windowed ebook upstart.

So ebooks may turn out to be no different from the trade or mass-market paperback: a new format, hugely significant as such, but not a new form. And if that is how it turns out, then it is likely to be far less disruptive for the publishing industry than many commentators thought and many insiders feared. Despite initial anxieties that ebooks might be the harbinger of a much more radical disruption in the publishing industry, many in the industry have now come to the view that ebooks are just another format in the sense that I’ve described here, albeit one that comes with an array of special features. This is how the CEO of one large trade house put it in 2017:

Fifty years after Allen Lane’s invention of the paperback we received the gift of a new format and, with it, we received the gift that people could, all of a sudden, read everywhere without having the book at hand because they had their reading device. And the gift was also that someone had developed an ecosystem that was so compelling that people were willing to actually pay for that experience – it was not something that started free like music and the Napster experience. So we had a paid ecosystem that was extremely compelling and convinced people that it made sense given the convenience not to steal books but actually to pay for them in a digital format.

This publisher has always been of the view that ebooks were more of a gain for the industry than a threat: publishers were lucky because others went to the expense of creating an ecosystem in which it was attractive for readers to purchase books in a digital format, thereby opening up a new revenue stream for publishers while obviating the need for consumers to acquire digital content illegally.

But will it turn out like that in the end – a revolution in format but not in form? There are two reasons why we can’t yet give a firm answer to this question, and one reason why the picture we’ve painted so far is incomplete at best. The first reason is that the stability of the current sales patterns, and in particular the levelling off of ebook sales relative to print sales, is dependent on the continuation of the current retail environment, which, despite the bankruptcy of Borders in 2011 and the closing of many Barnes & Noble stores, is still characterized by the existence of many bricks-and-mortar bookstores, both chain and independent. While Amazon has become the single largest customer for many trade publishers, the continued existence of a multiplicity of bookstores provides a vital shop window for publishers’ books – and that means, of course, their print books, which continue to get retail exposure thanks to the display space and shelf space of bookstores. Were this retail environment to change significantly in the coming years – were, for example, Barnes & Noble or Waterstones to scale back dramatically or even close down, or were bookstores forced to close for other reasons – then this could have a significant impact on the sales of physical books. We simply don’t know what would happen in that case to the relation between physical book sales and ebook sales, and how the different categories of book would be affected by this change. The second reason why we can’t give a firm answer to this question is that we simply don’t know what the future holds in store. On the basis of the evidence so far, there is a good prima facie case for saying that ebooks are best understood as another format rather than a new form of book, but only the future will tell whether this judgement holds in the long run.

The picture we’ve painted so far is, however, incomplete in one very important way: we’ve been relying on data from one large trade publisher, and, given the centrality of this publisher and the nature of their list, it is reasonable to assume that their experience will be similar to that of other large trade publishers. But the book market is populated not just with the output of large trade publishers: it is also populated with the output of many small and medium-sized publishers and, crucially, with the output of many self-publishers and many authors using self-publishing platforms of various kinds, from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to a plethora of other platforms (we’ll examine these in more detail in chapter 7). The experiences of many small and medium-sized publishers may not differ greatly from the experience of large trade publishers like Olympic, but the world of self-publishing is another matter entirely. Many of the self-publishing platforms, including Kindle Direct, are publishing in ebook only,¹³ and some self-published ebooks have become bestsellers.¹⁴ So the patterns in the world of self-publishing are likely to look quite different from the patterns of the large trade publishers who are publishing in print and ebook formats, and for whom print remains a key revenue stream. They are also likely to differ from the patterns that appear in the data supplied by professional organizations like the Association of American Publishers (AAP), since these data are drawn from traditional publishers and therefore don’t take account of self-publishing. So there is likely to be a substantial body of material, a high proportion of which is being published as ebooks, that is not being factored into these calculations about the patterns of ebook sales. How big a body of material? Nobody knows. We can try to estimate its size – we’ll return to this in chapter 7 – but any estimate is going to be a very rough guess. What we can say with some confidence is that it’s not small. Self-publishing is the submerged continent that could, if we were ever to know its true extent, put all of our calculations so far in a very different light.

There is one other reason why this point is important: in the wake of the Department of Justice case against Apple and five of the large trade publishers in 2012 (see chapter 5 below), these publishers were obliged to adopt for two years a modified version of the agency agreement that allowed retailers to discount ebooks to some extent. When this requirement expired in 2014, all the large trade publishers moved to full agency agreements, which meant that they set the prices of ebooks within agreed bands and retailers were no longer allowed to discount. This meant that new ebooks from the large trade publishers were – especially from 2014 on – typically selling at much higher prices than self-published ebooks. The difference might be as much as $13–$14 for the ebook of a newly released title from a large trade house compared to $3.99, $2.99 or less for a new ebook from a self-published author. And when you take account of the fact that a large proportion of books self-published on Kindle can be accessed for no charge by joining Kindle Unlimited for $9.99 per month (with a 30-day free trial), the cost per unit read of books self-published on Kindle becomes a small fraction of the cost per read of ebooks published by traditional publishers. Of course, there is the question of whether you want to read that material, however inexpensive it may be. But the fact that the price differential is now so great is likely to have the effect of driving down ebook sales from traditional publishers while self-published ebooks take a larger and larger share of the ebook cake, however large (or small) that cake may be.

We simply don’t know at this stage how the overall picture of ebook sales relative to total book sales, in both units and dollars, would change if we were able to take account of all books published and sold in the US in any particular year, including self-published books, and how the picture would vary by category of book. We might still see a plateau effect, though the levels at which ebooks begin to plateau might be quite a lot higher, especially in certain book categories, such as romance and mystery, which are popular in the world of self-publishing. Indeed, it could be that some of the decline we see in traditional publishers’ ebook sales in certain categories, like romance and mystery, attests not to an overall decline in ebook sales but rather to a revenue flight from traditional publishers to self-publishers, as readers migrate from higher-priced ebooks published by traditional publishers to much cheaper ebooks self-published through Kindle and through other self-publishing platforms. We’ll return to these questions in due course.