The decline of academic book sales

Michael Jubb’s recent report on (UK) Academic Books and their Future (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) — part of the Academic Book of the Future-project — makes for depressing reading.

Matthew Reisz’s piece in Times Higher Education sums it up pretty well: Worst sellers: warning of existential crisis for academic books, as “the number of individual [academic] titles sold rose by 45 per cent, from 43,000 to 63,000” between 2005 and 2014 — but (Nielsen BookScan-tracked sales figures): “show a decline for academic books of 13 per cent between 2005 and 2014, from 4.34 million to 3.76 million annually”. Add it all up, and: “this meant that average sales per title fell from 100 to 60″…

The median is likely lower yet.

That is from Michael Orthofer of Literary Saloon, by the way here is my earlier Conversation with Michael.

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