Survey: Retailers report strong economic health

The following is a statement from Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO, Association of American Publishers: “The American Booksellers Association newly released whitepaper, American Monopoly: Amazon’s Anti-Competitive Behavior is in Violation of Antitrust Laws, provides a clear outline of the longstanding, anti-competitive behavior that has enabled Amazon to gain a dominant position in the publishing industry. As AAP noted in comments filed with the FTC in 2019, the fact is that no publisher can avoid distributing through Amazon and, for all intents and purposes, Amazon dictates the economic terms, with publishers paying more for Amazon’s services each year and receiving less in return. At the same time Amazon’s approach to its bookstore enables widespread counterfeiting, defective products, and fake reviews that both degrade the consumer experience and diminish the incentives of authors and publishers to create new works and bring them to the marketplace. We thank the American Booksellers Association for making a clear, concise, and powerful case for government officials to step in quickly and decisively to exercise corrective measures and appropriate governance of this dominant platform.”

Today’s college students have grown up in a digital world, so one might expect that most of them would prefer e-textbooks to print on paper, but that’s not the case according to a new survey conducted by Direct Textbook, a free textbook price comparison service. The survey reports that 62% college students prefer print textbooks to e-textbooks. This represents a 10% decline in print textbook preference since 2015, when 72% of students reported favoring print textbooks, but it doesn’t mean students are embracing e-textbooks. Despite the growing e-textbook market, student preference for e-textbooks increased by just 2% from 2015 (27%) to 2021 (29%), while the number of students who have no preference increased by nearly 8% over that same period. Students who prefer print textbooks say they are easier to read and that they have trouble concentrating on e-textbooks. They also like that no internet is required. And 25% say they end up printing e-textbook pages anyway.

Given all of the attention that the Department of Justice’s successful trial to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster drew, it can be hard to remember what other trends, challenges, and issues confronted the publishing industry in 2022. In many ways, last year the industry was still dealing with the fallout caused by the pandemic. For one thing, return-to-office policies remained in flux throughout the year; just when a publisher would announce plans to bring back employees to the office for a few days a week, another surge would come along and scuttle those plans. In addition, executives at the big publishers were meeting stiff resistance from employees on any sort of mandate to return to the office. In PW’s most recent salary and jobs survey, respondents said that the creation of work-from-home policies was the most important benefit their company established during the height of the pandemic, and the overwhelming majority of respondents were concerned that their company would soon be requiring employees to be in the office for a certain number of days each week.