Two More Reasons To Go Indie – Print Units Fell 9% in 2011
No additional commentary needed. These excerpts are from Publisher’s Weekly and show why legacy publishing is sinking.
“The final numbers from Nielsen BookScan are in for 2011 and they show that print sales through the outlets it tracks fell by just over 9% in the year. Total units sold were 651.2 million. The decline in 2011 was about double that of 2010 and reflects the closing of Borders and rise in digital sales.”
Adult fiction and mass market paperbacks hit hard times
“After falling 7.2% in 2010, unit sales of print adult fiction tumbled 17.7% last year, to just over 160 million units, by far the steepest drop of the four major categories as more and more consumers turned to e-books for their fiction fix. Similar to 2010, sales of adult nonfiction took much less of a hit in 2011 than fiction, with units off 3.1% compared to 1.9% in 2010. The difference in the rate of decline between adult fiction and nonfiction rose significantly between 2010, when the difference was about six percentage points, and 2011, when the spread was more than 14 percentage points.”
