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North American Book Market |
Copyright 2009 by Morris Rosenthal All Rights Reserved |
2008 US Sales for Amazon, BN.com, Barnes&Noble and Dalton, Borders and WaldenbooksCopyright 2009 by Morris Rosenthal - All Rights Reserved Updated based on press releases - waiting on official SEC filing of 10Ks from B&N and Borders in April The following current year information about book industry sales is taken from the annual reports, SEC filings and company press releases for the full year 2008 from Barnes&Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, and BN.com. International sales numbers for Borders and Amazon not included. It looks like Amazon is now the biggest book retailer, both in North America and overseas, that Barnes&Noble saw sales drop around 5% on the year, and Borders is on its last legs. Note, if you're self employed as an author or publisher, I've just worked up some statistics about sole proprietorships.
Growth stagnated for booksellers in 2008, and overall book sales barely moved according the the government (table below).The combined total for media sales (mainly books) of the Barnes&Noble and Borders chains plus Amazon North America and BN.com was $13.70 billion, with all the gain comng from Amazon. Barnes and Noble, in their 2006 conference call, pointed out that "most" of their business is in stable backlist sales, and their most valuable asset is their real estate. These sums include a couple billion dollars worth of DVD's, CD's, coffee and brownies that aren't publicly broken out of the numbers. Borders North American sales shrank again 2008, Amazon media sales grew at a health pace, though down from 2007 when Prime was introduced. Amazon got serious about ebooks again in 2007 with the release of their Kindle reader, now over 300,000+ titles and with new Kindle readers and titles selling rapidly. The $16.9 billion estimated by the US Census Bureau also includes the other non-book goods sold by those retailers, but doesn't include Amazon and other mail-order sellers.. The $16.9 billion figure is a good $10 billion lower than total book sales estimates from various industry surveys, but those surveys include both mass merchandisers, such as Walmarts and supermarkets, where a relatively limited selection of titles are sold, the Elhi (Elementary through High School) market for textbooks, which accounts for approximately $5 billion in sales per year, and bookclubs. With specialty religion bookshops accounting for at least another billion in sales a year, and several billion dollars in professional books being sold through nontraditional channels, it's apparent that there isn't a huge slice of pie left over for the general indy booksellers by anybody's math. Within the Barnes&Noble and Borders chains, book sales are falling at their small stores (B. Dalton and Waldenbooks) which are being shut down and replaced with superstores. In 2005, Amazon bought BookSurge LLC, an aggressive POD company whose performance had hitherto been limited by their lack of access to Amazon. They don't break out Booksurge in their annual report, but Booksurge published 3,980 titles in 2006 and is up past 10,000 titles overall. Amazon stopped selling ebooks through their International sites in 2005 and dropped the Lightning Source ebooks that made up most of their North American ebook sales in 2006. Google announced they would start selling ebooks in 2006 but never did. Borders International sales, not included above, were over a half a billion dollars - Amazon's international media sales, also not included above, were nearly $3.5 billion dollars, just a couple percent below their North America sales and larger than Borders North American sales. In 2008, Borders reported a loss and announced they are trying to sell their international operations and may sell the whole chain.
Amazon failed to grow sales through third party sellers for the second stright year in 2007, including those individuals and businesses selling through Amazon Marketplace, Merchants and other programs. Third party sales accounted for 28% of Amazon's total unit sales in 2007, no change from 2005, but still more than one in 4 items sold. If you assume that the majority of the third party item sales are books, and that the non-book media vs book ratio continues around 1:2, this would imply that about 1 in 3 books sold at Amazon are actually sold by a third party without even taking the other Amazon merchandise into account. That other merchandise accounts for almost two out of five of Amazon's sales dollars, but probably at a lower item count than books and media due to the higher pricing of items such as electronics, jewlery and automobiles:-) Book sales from the US Census Bureau (Sales data is now comma delimited, html no longer available)
1Months are frequently revised on the Census spreadsheet after the fact, you just have to go back and check:-) Included in survey: 4512111 Book Stores, General Establishments primarily engaged in retailing a general line of new books. These establishments may also sell stationery and related items, second-hand books, and magazines. 4512112 Specialty Book Stores Establishments primarily engaged in retailing specialty books, such as general reference, religious, and professional books. 4512113 College Book Stores Establishments primarily engaged in retailing textbooks, generally on the college level. Most of these establishments are located on or near college campuses, and some sell more apparel than books. These establishments may also offer second-hand textbooks. School book stores, other than college, are included in this industry. I've decided to start tracking the number of titles available from the major author service companies on Amazon. Author services presses are also known as self publishing companies, subsidy or vanity presses. The motivation is the announcement that Author Services Inc is buying Xlibris, which brings the original Big Three, iUniverse, Xlibris and AuthorHouse under one roof. But I suspect that it's a defensive move, as Amazon builds up their own presence. Several of these companies will also publish books for an author or small publisher under the imprint name belonging to that author or publisher, so those titles aren't reflected in this total.
Or, by graph:-)
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