To figure out the answers, we’ll have to dive in deep to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in 2012 against Apple - newly entered into the ebook market with the advent of the iPad - and five of what was then the Big Six publishing houses. So what happened? How did the apparently inevitable ebook revolution fail to come to pass? And increasingly, such disparities aren’t an exception. On Amazon as I’m writing this, a copy of Sally Rooney’s Normal People costs $12.99 as an ebook, but only $11.48 as a hardcover. They also cost more than everyone predicted they would - and consistently, they cost more than their print equivalents. It’s convenient.”Įbooks aren’t only selling less than everyone predicted they would at the beginning of the decade. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers.

“They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says.

“Five or 10 years ago,” says Andrew Albanese, a senior writer at trade magazine Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99, “you would have thought those numbers would have been reversed.”Īnd in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. Instead, at the other end of the decade, ebook sales seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent.

Analysts confidently predicted that millennials would embrace ebooks with open arms and abandon print books, that ebook sales would keep rising to take up more and more market share, that the price of ebooks would continue to fall, and that publishing would be forever changed. They appeared poised to disrupt the publishing industry on a fundamental level. By 2010, it was clear that ebooks weren’t just a passing fad, but were here to stay. The Amazon Kindle, which was introduced in 2007, effectively mainstreamed ebooks. At the beginning of the 2010s, the world seemed to be poised for an ebook revolution.

Amazon digital book reader