Does Digital Cannibalize Print?
One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we’re seeing for ebooks, and it’s a quite reasonable concern. Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what’s happening: Over the past 18 months, we’ve gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite. But that’s not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you’d expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that’s not what’s happening. Here’s a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period): Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a
