Today’s post is excerpted from the new book Digital Inc. by literary agent Richard Curtis.
Notwithstanding predictions by ebook pioneers of a paperless world; notwithstanding denunciations by indie anarchists that the feudalist book business was on the verge of collapse; notwithstanding publishers’ struggles to adapt their superannuated industry to a dazzling new technology—the print book industry did not founder. In fact, not long after the first wave of electronic books swept readers up at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, print went on to thrive and thrives to this day. According to Statista, “Print … remains the most popular book format among U.S. consumers, with 65 percent of adults having read a print book in the last twelve months.” While ebooks maintain a significant place on the reading spectrum, they have proportionately lost ground since their debut early in the 2000s.
What accounts for print’s unshakeable traction? Or to reverse the question, why haven’t ebooks conquered the paper world as the technology’s progenitors predicted? There are several answers.
My own theory is that a whole generation of kids grew up reading printed books or having them read to them or selecting them on visits to the library. Thus, their preference for that format carried over to adult reading. In the dawn of the digital revolution, publishers experimented with hypertext and hotlinks to produce animated books that children could not only read but watch and hear as well. These books “read” themselves without parental intervention. The idea was for children to learn to read on their own through stimulating images and sounds, vocabulary prompts that pronounced the words aloud, pictures that moved and danced and flashed. These gadgets, subsequently called “vooks” (a portmanteau blend of “video” or “virtual” and “books”), would liberate parents from the task of helping their children to read and learn. In 2009, Vook, a software platform for the creation of digital video books, was introduced.
This was great in theory, but it failed to recognize that few parents believe reading to their children is an unpleasant task. Quite the contrary, they love snuggling up with their kids and reading together. The intimacy of reading a print or picture book to your child, or having your child read to you, cannot be duplicated by self-reading devices. As I wrote in 2012, “Though picture book apps and stories that ‘tell’ themselves without parents present are great fun, they just don’t seem to have the same appeal as the warm body and familiar voice of mommy or daddy.”
It is arguable (based on two thousand years of human interaction with the codex format) that the tactile experience of holding and reading a printed book is superior to the awkwardness (for children at least) of manipulating text and pictures on a computer.
There was something else: Many parents sensed that children do not benefit from reading on screen as much as they do from immersion in print books. A number of studies confirmed that children are easily distracted by ebooks and do not retain information the way they do from printed ones. One such experiment, conducted by a team headed by Tiffany G. Munzer, MD, Department of Pediatrics, University of Michigan Medical School, confirmed what previous studies had found: “less dialogic interaction between parents and preschoolers during electronic-book reading versus print.” They concluded:
Parents and toddlers verbalized less with electronic books, and collaboration was lower. Future studies should examine specific aspects of tablet-book design that support parent–child interaction. Pediatricians may wish to continue promoting shared reading of print books, particularly for toddlers and younger children.
As children matured and became adept with computers and cell phones, the ebook became an option rather than a necessity, good for some kinds of reading but not the device of choice for settling in with an immersive story or researching a paper.
Children’s preference for book books (as publishing denizens smilingly call them) over electronic ones has carried into the present generation and been passed on to the next one, as evidenced by the perpetually strong market for children’s books. Though sales of adult books have fluctuated in the twenty-first century, print books for young readers have held the line and made a profit year after year. During the boom years for ebooks of 2008–12, sales of print trade books fell 8.4 percent except for one category: children’s books. Publishers Weekly noted that in that period “children’s/young adult had the strongest gain, with sales jumping 117 percent, from $215.9 million to $469.2 million.” Sales of children’s books have continued to soar, reaching some $3 billion in 2022.
Another successful boost for printed books comes from the area of expensive special editions, artistically designed formats that fans and collectors can display on their bookshelves. Limited editions have always been popular in the science fiction genre but as the term “limited” implies, the printings were deliberately small to keep the value of these rare volumes high. However, in the early 2020s, special editions became all the rage in romance as well, with one publisher issuing printings exceeding a million copies. As Alexandra Alter described them in The New York Times, “Publishers are investing in colorful patterned edges, metallic foil covers, reversible jackets, elaborate artwork on the endpapers, ribbon bookmarks and bonus content.”
Print’s sustained hardiness was also reflected in the paperback sector. On the bad-news side, sales of the mass market format have been steadily declining over the past two decades. Their death notice was recently announced in Publishers Weekly: “Sales of mass market paperbacks have steadily declined in recent years, to the point where they accounted for only about 3 percent of units sold at retailers that report to Circana BookScan in 2024. The format will take another big blow at the end of 2025, when Readerlink will stop distributing mass market paperbacks to its accounts.” ReaderLink describes itself as “the largest full-service distributor in North America” with six US distribution centers supplying over 100,000 stores.
The good news is that the slack has been taken up by the success of trade paperbacks. Major publishers are shifting their focus to trade paperback as the format of choice both for originals and reprints. Even mass-market paperback publishers that prospered with genre literature like romance and science fiction are pushing their chips onto the larger trim size.
This seismic shift is not just a matter of taste but also reflects the drastic change in the way books are distributed and displayed. The old mass market system—monthly selections delivered to candy store, grocery, and drugstore racks—has been largely replaced by bookstores whose shelves are better designed to stock and display trade paperbacks. This format is more economical in reprinting hardcovers because they are the same trim size and often use the same cover. The average return rate for trade paperbacks is considerably lower than the 40 percent or more for mass market paperbacks, because trade paperbacks have far longer shelf lives.
Trade paper has become the preferred format for literary originals and reprints of most trade hardcovers, whereas mass market paperbacks are for the most part reserved for reprints of major bestsellers. (The exceptions are books in genres like science fiction, romance, westerns and horror, which continue to sell as mass market originals and are carried in big-box outlets like Walmart.)
Another reason for the popularity of trade paperbacks is that when they go out of stock, publishers can replenish them using print on demand (POD), which reduces the risks both of overprinting or underprinting. In fact, print on demand is another reason why print books have prevailed. Books that used to die after their initial printings have a long, if not infinite, life thanks to POD technology. Although the term “long tail” was invented to describe a somewhat different business strategy, I felt that it applied perfectly to the infinite life of digitized books—and to the power of POD to make niche products like specialized books available to almost anyone, anywhere.
As for my prediction that the returns-driven publishing business would be supplanted by one based on print on demand, I got it half right. By 2020, LightningSource, the leading on-demand printing company, had grown into a $2 billion company, with 18 million titles in its inventory. But the consignment model, that relic of an era when returns were modest, endures, especially when it comes to blockbuster books, where economies of scale more than balance losses from returns. Publishers are better able to manage printings, distribution and inventory than they were in the Roaring 1990s. They simply regard losses from returned copies as an inevitable cost of doing business and pass them along to consumers in the form of higher list prices.
Another boost to the fortunes of printed books was assimilation of the new media. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, a young, technically astute generation of editors had figured out how to apply to book production solutions developed by ebook publishers and self-published authors. The result was improved marketing, targeted advertising and publicity, robust social media campaigns, and greater synergy between print and other media, such as audiobooks. In his 2023 end-of-year message, Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch noted that “more than half our sales take place on digital retail platforms. … With new tools that track how often customers look at a book page and then go on to purchase the book, this program encourages our publishing teams to measure and adjust selling lines, title descriptions, images and other elements of our book pages in order to drive more sales.”
These improvements may explain the paradox that the number of book publishing jobs has dramatically declined in the past 25 years, from 91,100 in 1997 to 54,822 in 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (This statistic doesn’t include people employed in self-publishing, which is impossible to quantify.) A 2024 Publishers Weekly article by Thad McIlroy and Jim Milliot confirms that “publishing has become more efficient in the digital age.” Yet profitability has improved, confirming the sustained strength of the traditional book business—what book developer and agent Philip Turner described as “The Persistence of Print.”
If print books prospered in the twenty-first century, Book Expo America, the American book industry’s biggest annual event, should have prospered, too. Paradoxically, the conference went into decline and died in 2020. Why? Possibly because BEA was essentially an analog island in a digital ocean, fatally slow to embrace the new technology even during the ebook’s most expansive period from 2009 to 2020.
The American Booksellers Association convention had started in 1947 but was renamed Book Expo America when Reed Exhibitions acquired it in 1995. Independent booksellers came to New York City from all over the country and indeed all over the world, to Manhattan’s mammoth Jacob Javits Center, to “crawl” the aisles and gawk, meet authors, gossip with old friends, check out trends, collect catalogs, grab ARCs (advance reading copies) of big books and order titles for the coming season from exhibiting publishers.
Yet, for all its bookish glamour, BEA just wasn’t sexy enough to maintain its attraction, and attendance began to drop.
BEA lacked the go-go excitement of digital publishing, which had become an organic component of the book industry. The cost and hassle of travel to New York City was also a factor. Booksellers were relying more and more on remote means of studying publishers’ online lists (called “e-catalogues”), reading PDFs of forthcoming books, communicating with their sales reps and ordering books. Attendance had drastically declined from 13,872 in 2010 (not counting exhibitor personnel) to a mere 8,260 in 2019. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic finished BEA off, as it did so many other in-person events.
Online programs were substituted, but because the Expo had been struggling with attendance and identity issues anyway (and the number of days it was open was down to two), it was decided in 2020 to “retire” BEA until a new format and approach could be found to lure the book community back into convention centers.
BEA was about traveling to a geographical locus to celebrate physical objects, the very definition of an analog event. It died of irrelevance. R.I.P. BEA.
Richard Curtis is a leading New York literary agent, publishing authority, e-book pioneer, and authors’ advocate. He was the first president of the Independent Literary Agents Association and subsequently president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives. Curtis’s fascination with emerging media and technology led to his founding one of the first commercial e-book publishers, seven years prior to the introduction of the Kindle and the advent of the E-Book Revolution. He is also author of dozens of works of fiction and nonfiction, the most recent of which is Digital Inc. (Rivertowns Books, 2026).
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