eBooks grow to 23 percent of total book sales

It's been interesting to watch the fast growth of eBooks. Mashable published the newest numbers from the Association of American Publishers's StatShot study, eBook sales accounted for 22.55 percent of U.S. trade publishers' book sales in 2012. How does that compare to past sales, you're wondering?

2011: 17 percent

2009: 3 percent

So, we've got some serious growth in the percentage of sales here. The meta-percentage growth is almost 800 percent growth in percentage of sales in just three years.

It means that eBooks are growing. One interesting stat is that only 21 percent of Americans own an eReader and, as Mashable notes, the adoption of eReaders is slowing down. So what we may be seeing is that the people who have eReaders are buying more books, thus accounting for the higher percentage.

The future

So what does this mean for eBooks? Clearly they are a growing industry, and in an economy that isn't seeing much growth, I think that means there will be more and more of them.

But the interesting thing for me will be to watch how publishers start to target specifically readers who own eReaders. If their adoption is slowing, I would guess that means that there is a certain segment of the population who like reading on eReaders. I would also venture to guess that a fair amount of new eReader sales are people who already have one buying a newer version, so that would mean that even less new readers are adopting eReaders. And that sliver, say 18 percent of Americans, are buying tons of eBooks.

My marketing senses are sounding the alarm. It would seem that there is a broad target market of people who enjoy reading on eReaders, and that within that group, there are niches of what content those readers like. For the future, I think that means new forms of targeted marketing on and around eReaders. And I think it means iteration of content to feed the reading habits, which will be increasingly better documented, of the people who use eReaders.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of fraumrau via flickr