CBC Report: “E-readers Were Supposed to Kill Printed Books. Instead, They’re Booming”

From the CBC:

Print book sales are up 10‒14 per cent over three years in most major English-speaking markets, says Duncan Stewart, a consumer forecasting analyst for Deloitte who lives in Toronto and specializes in media and technology. He says those are quite nice numbers “for an industry that many people thought was dying.”

When they first gained popularity, industry watchers predicted e-books would soon be the preferred medium for younger readers who were growing up online, he told The Cost of Living, while print books would remain the go-to for their grandparents.

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“It was the exact opposite story,” said Stewart. “Interestingly, Kindles and similar e-readers were more popular with the older generations we surveyed, whereas younger people were as interested in print, or more, than their older fellow readers.”

Stewart says that’s because, in addition to e-readers being easy on the eyeballs, older book lovers read more per week, appreciate the portability of having so much to read on a small device and already have full bookshelves at home.

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Consumer survey data from Booknet, a non-profit that develops tools and standards for the Canadian book industry, shows that just 17 per cent of Canadian purchases were in e-book format in 2022, while 47 per cent were paperback and 25 per cent hardcover. The data was collected by Kantar quarterly in March, June, September and December 2022, and has a margin of error of ± three percentage points.

Learn More, Read the Complete Article (about 1400 words); Listen to Audio Report

See Also: Canada: Most Circulated Books of 2023 (via BookNet Canada)

See Also: Canada: Bestselling books of 2023 (via BookNet Canada)

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