One of the industries being most buffeted by the transition to e-commerce is publishing. For decades book publishers have used a network of book retailers as their primary means of getting books to the general public. With the advent of e-commerce this began to change. One can see clearly the speed with which this shift has altered the bookselling landscape. Amazon was started in 1994 and by 2010 it became the largest retailer of books in the United States. The previous book retailing leaders, Barnes & Noble and Borders (which entered bankruptcy reorganization this month) have scrambled to adjust to the new world of selling books while independent booksellers continue to hang on for dear life, declining in number every year as they have since the 1980s with the rise of Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Further complicating this dynamic shifting within the book world is the fact that books and magazines themselves are reasonably easily digitized. This means that the Internet provided a means not only to place orders for books and magazines but to instantly receive them in a digital format. While the shift to e-books is still young—representing less than 9% of the trade book market in 2010—it is a vibrant part of the publishing business and is coloring many of the actions taken by publishers and booksellers alike as they try and adapt to the new realities of the retail landscape for books, magazines, and all printed material.

For anyone interested in more statistics on this subject, we studied it closely last year and have a series of posts on the subject at another of our sites, the Dwarf Planet Press blog site, available here.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2003 and 2008
Market size: Sales: $2.06 and $5.14 billion respectively, an increase of 149%.
Source: “Table 1055. Electronic Shopping and Mail-Order Houses—Total and E-Commerce Sales by Merchandise Line,” Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011, U.S. Census Bureau, page 663, available online here in a spreadsheet format, and here as a PDF file.
One word of clarification to help prevent any confusion about just what is being presented here. The data in the source table are provided in two columns per year, the first one called “Total,” and the second is “E-Commerce”. The column headed “Total” refers to the total sales for the industry “Electronic Shopping and Mail-order Houses,” [NAICS 4541], and the second column is the e-commerce portion of that industry’s total. Do not confuse the “Total” column for a measure of total sales of the product line listed in that row. It is, rather, the total sales of that product line made electronically and through mail-order houses.
Original source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.