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The Digital Drop – Print Sales Are Up, eBook Sales Are Down
Bleeding Cool has been stating that digital sales of comic book titles have been at a plateau now for a year or so. Growth for publishers and distributors like ComiXology has come from opening new markets, spreading out into new countries and making new products available to their existing audience. Individual sales of individual titles are not rising.
Basically, the Americans who were buying Catwoman digitally two years ago are pretty much the Americans buying it now.
Certain titles do very well on digital compared to print, such as Ms Marvel, Gotham Academy or Lumberjanes. Publishers love them because they have found a new audience that wasn't being tapped into before. But even that audience isn't growing.
Indeed, could it be shrinking?
The Publishers Association which has been monitoring the digital book market in Britain states that the sales of printed books have grown for the first time in four years, lifted by the adult colouring book craze, with sales of printed books growing by 0.4% to £2.76 billion
Simultaneously, eBooks suffered their first ever decline, with revenue raised dropping 1.6% to £554 million in 2015.
Print is back. It never went away….