Print books are far, far from dead

First off, I dig tech. I have two laptops, a smartphone, and me and my wife are saving up for the next iPad. But I also deeply love print books. In fact, I prefer reading print books so much that I, someone who works in book marketing, pretty much only read ebooks for business research or when my clients publish ebooks. What I mean is, ebooks are a work medium for me. Print books are for pleasure and discretionary learning.

Ebook publishers, coders, and retailers have been working furiously over the past few years to make ereaders and ebooks better and better. It's great. I'm into it. And the numbers show that ebook sales are skyrocketing, as are sales of the ereaders and tablets we read them on. But there's a not quite true interpretation of that rise that goes like this:

"The more ebooks people buy, the less print books will sell." -- Assumption

It's based on the assumption that there is a somewhat fixed number of books that will be sold in a given year. For example, let's say that overall, Americans buy 100 million books a year. 20 years ago those were all print. Now, maybe 50 million ebooks are sold. So, the simple math based on this assumption means that print sales would decline to 50 million.

Only, that's not what's happening.

BookStats, a co-production of the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, reported:

"While eBooks keep growing, hardcover and trade paperback formats continued to hold steady in 2012."

So, what is happening, then?

Basically, some people prefer ebooks and some people prefer print.

For example, The Atlantic reports on a "Pew Research [that] found that 94 percent of parents think it's important to read print books to their children -- with 82 percent saying it's very important." They also cite "A recent survey of children between eight and 16 years old in the United Kingdom found that, yes, 52 percent prefer e-readers, but 32 percent would still rather read print."

They speculate that print will remain popular with older people, women/girls, and a subset of the general population. Perhaps, as they say, print will become more of a niche or luxury item. A little like records for music, or maybe more like going to the cinema to see a film rather than watching it on your laptop or tv at home.

The wild card, of course, is what people under 12 who are growing up with tablets in their homes will think of print when they get older. Will they dismiss print as old fashioned? Or will they appreciate and embrace it? Will they live completely digital lives, or will they want to read print as a respite? Or will some other reason or format we can't conceive of yet come to prominence?

We can't know the future, of course. But what we do know is that print is not dying nearly as horrifically as we are often told.

Image source: CresySusy via flickr