Tweet This
Publishers have begun backtracking on their commitments to digital. At the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week, according to The Telegraph, Penguin General Books managing director Joana Prior said the company has started looking more critically at its investments in electronic publishing.
"There was a definite moment when we all went shooting out after the shiny app thing and spent money on that and invested probably unwisely in products that we thought could in some way enhance the book," she said. "We somehow lost confidence in the power of the word on the page, which was a bad moment."
Others have been touting the death of digital since last fall, when it became clear that e-book sales had fallen earlier in 2015. There's a constant tug of war in publishing between print and digital, with the champions of each side relishing in the declining sales of the other.
When e-book sales decline, it's a testament to the staying power of the "book," as if the word has only one true meaning. It's a result of the pleasant sensory experience that accompanies the act of flipping paper pages. It's because our brains process words better when they're not back-lit.
When print-book sales decline, it's evident that the US population has embraced the digital revolution. Publishers herald themselves as being prepared for the future; anyone who hasn't started publishing electronically is dangerously behind.
This conversation will likely continue in perpetuity.
The news of Prior's statement is, then, not surprising. What is interesting, however, is a major publisher's decision to focus on print despite the increasing popularity of digital on Amazon. A few days before the festival, One Click Retail announced that, based on its research, Amazon had seen a 73% increase in e-book sales over August.
It's likely that Prior wasn't talking about e-books, the digital versions of print equivalents. Her reference to apps makes it seem like the casualty will be the supplementary products like apps and interactive websites that offer bonus material to passionate readers. This is important to note--while people may be reading books digitally (regardless of whether they're doing so more or less often than they did a couple of years ago), they may not be engaging digitally outside of the original content.
As Prior said, publishers are likely shifting back to print-centrism, having seen many expensive projects fail to produce positive returns. The strategic attempts to balance print and digital products will continue to evolve over the coming year, however, if Amazon sees more monthly digital gains.
