Monday, April 8, 2013

Digital vs Print

Publishers Weekly had an interesting article today, comparing the top 20 bestselling print books of 2013 (so far) to the top 20 bestselling ebooks of 2013 (so far).

You'd think the lists would be very similar, but they were not. Only four books (Gone Girl, Safe Haven, Fifty Shades Freed, and Alex Cross, Run) appeared on both. PW pointed out that women's fiction and romance dominated the ebook list, while other types of books like picture books fell away.

Because I renewed my love of making pie charts over the weekend, I went ahead a made charts of the two lists.

This is the print list, broken down by genre*:



*Some people might select the genres differently. I simply searched on B&N for the books and found what genre was mentioned. It is not at all scientific.

And this is the ebook list, again by genre:

  

The blue slice is the women's fiction/romance group. It gets much bigger in the ebook list. Young Adult and New Adult (red and pink) appear on this list, when they don't at all on the print. 

But the ebook list loses religious, non-fiction, middle grade and picture books. I rather expected the loss of picture books, but am surprised by the loss of the non-fiction category--especially considering my previous post showed several self published NF books being bought up traditional houses.

PW notes that seven of the ebook bestsellers were self-published. (This number excludes the 50 Shades books, for some reason--I suspect because this is the Vintage edition they are measuring.) But that means that nearly half of the ebook bestsellers were self published. 

The other trend I see in ebook bestsellers is movies. Seven of the titles (Safe Haven, Beautiful Creatures, Alex Cross, Run, Beautiful Darkness, The Silver Linings Playbook, The Host, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower) were recently made into films, or had books in that series made into films. Only two of those--mentioned above--made it onto the print list.

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