Personally, I like both. Image: goodereader.com

I was talking to the lawyer of a big publishing house the other day. We were discussing ebooks, and he made the claim that ebooks were just a fad, and one that is dying off at that. Obviously, this surprised me, so I asked him about his sources. “Sector publications,” he said, somewhat vaguely.

He was right: several publications have been making similar claims in the last 3 years. I even posted about the supposed shrinking of the US book market back in 2015. But our chat made me think it might be time to see what has happened since.

The Error In The Method

It all started with a 2015 Nielsen Pubtrack estimate which said that 6% fewer ebooks had been sold in the US in 2014. A subsequent Ink, Bits & Pixels post convincingly showed that Nielsen’s estimate of 223 million ebooks