Books are making a comeback as sales rise again

Against all expectations, the traditional book is making a comeback.

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.” Luckily for dreamers and writers such as British ­storyteller Neil Gaiman, respon­sible for that quote, the printed book lives on.

Just as Michael Bodey wrote last week of the rude good health of the radio industry, against all expectations, the traditional book is making a comeback. Last year, for the first time in nearly a decade, book sales rose in Australia — by 2.4 per cent to $979 million. Add $410m in education sales and leading Australian publishers are starting to see a way through the digital disruption of the past ­decade.

They also see a stabilising of digital book sales globally. ­E-books appear to have plateaued at 20 per cent of the market in the English-speaking world.

Shona Martyn, publisher of Harper Collins, owned by News Corporation, publisher of this newspaper, feels some optimism for the longer term because some categories targeting the young are booming. Children’s books, after the fillip of the Harry Potter series and dozens of others writers since, are soaring and represent 50 per cent of the industry’s growth.

Fiction for young women in the vein of the very successful ­Veronica Roth Divergent trilogy is growing, suggesting young female readers see the escapism of books as a relief from life online. This is the ultimate escapism: life off the ubiquitous phone and its Facebook feed.

Even boys are plunging in with new sport-based multi-volume sets such as Test cricketer David Warner’s Kaboom series and Test rugby player Israel Folau’s Izzy Folau, Chance of a Lifetime and Izzy Folau, Reality Check. These are the new Swiss Family Robinson for those boys parents find difficult to motivate about reading.

One of the industry’s most outspoken publishers, Louise Adler, of Melbourne University Press, says stories of the death of books “have been exaggerated and very premature”.

Martyn and Adler both point to the unprecedented success of colouring-in books for adults as a sign that the book business, 560 years after the Gutenberg Bible, can still throw up surprises. ­Nielsen Bookscan says 12 million colouring-in books for adults were sold in the US last year.

Adler says to understand the trend of print book sales the industry will need to look at what happens after the colouring-in book phenomenon dies down. She is not concerned about digital versus printed books.

“Everybody has all books on all platforms. Publishers are platform neutral in the same way as newspaper publishers,” Adler says.

Martyn says e-books now dominate female literary readers over 50 and older readers who appreciate adjustable type size.

“But there is a lot of evidence teenage readers prefer print books and they like the collectability aspect. Harry Potter brought a new generation of readers in the 1990s and they are now consuming the darker psychological thrillers like The Girl On The Train, Gone Girl and Caroline Overington’s latest (The One Who Got Away),” ­Martyn says. She believes e-books are valuable to publishers who wish to rush out the back catalogue of a newly successful author. They also dominate the self-publishing business.

Adler believes digital technology is providing other ways to help publishers. Audio book downloads (the new cassette tape books of the past) are up 28 per cent in a year in Britain and publishers and stores with good websites can share in the success of Amazon in online sales, she says. Book Tubing (Youtube for books) and other online reading groups are a good way for publishers to spread the word about new ­authors.

But Australian book retailers are generally seen to have a long way to go to become as good at selling their stock online as retailers in the US and Britain. The rise of Booktopia, the country’s largest independent online bookstore, has shown how this can be done well. Sales from overseas, such as through Amazon, are dependent on the exchange rate at the time.

A 318-page study published in February by Jan Zwar of ­Macquarie University’s Faculty of Business and Economics shows the 25 publishers examined have found many ways to innovate and improve in response to digital disruption. The university website quotes Dr Zwar: “As a mid-size industry, Australian publishers have been forced to work harder in order to compete globally.”

While the study found much concern about possible changes to parallel import rules and the ability of publishing houses to identify and bring to market new authors, it did see e-books as a cheaper way to introduce new young voices and to allow self-publishing.

“Momentum was set up in Australia by Pan Macmillan to ­experiment with e-publishing, e-book pricing and digital sales channels. Kylie Scott, who is now a New York Times best-selling ­author, was discovered through Momentum’s open submission process,” Dr Zwar says on the Macquarie website.

The report finds the loss of bricks and mortar booksellers, such as Angus & Robertson, Borders and the ABC Shops, has been partly offset by the growth of sales through Big W stores and Target.

The study concludes: “Many books published in Australia have more challenging economies of scale and time frames to achieve a return on investment. Fiction ­titles, which have the exceptional backing of large publishers, may achieve sales of 50,000 to 100,000 while specialist ... titles and books of poetry may sell in the low hundreds.” The study finds digital publishing has not improved the ability of authors to earn an “average wage” and has not improved prospects for “literary works”.

Interestingly, after the success of Text Publishing’s Magda Szubanski autobiography Reckoning, last year’s book of the year, ­Martyn says publishers are on the hunt for blockbuster autobiographies of famous Australians. Harper Collins has big hopes for singer Jimmy Barnes’s autobiography Working Class Boy this Christmas. (And I must declare Adler is publishing my much more modest book about life as a newspaper editor, Making Headlines, probably in September or October.)

So how does the future look in reality? I will leave it to Martyn: “The book is surviving but there are lots and lots of challenges for the industry. One of the biggest challenges is what consumers are doing with their time ... Facebooking, Snapchatting or whatever.”