Amazon got its start in 1994 selling books. Decades later, this original business is thriving and far outperforming its digital cousin, e-books.
That’s according to a detailed internal document obtained by Business Insider that reveals a wealth of new information and insights about Amazon’s book business and the broader publishing landscape.
Reliable data on this industry is limited or tightly controlled, so it is sometimes difficult to understand the scale of the book sector. That makes Amazon’s new data particularly noteworthy, especially as antitrust questions persist over the company’s dominance of the industry.
In the first 10 months of 2022, Amazon made $16.9 billion in gross merchandise sales in its books category, according to the document. GMS measures the total sales volume of print and digital books, including e-books and audiobooks.
This translates to an average monthly book sales volume of nearly $1.7 billion, or about $400 million per week. In the United States alone, Amazon recorded a total book sales volume of approximately $9.5 billion during these 10 months.
This shows how successful Amazon has been in keeping its original business thriving for almost three decades. It also reveals how physical books have endured as a reading format, while e-books have failed to live up to their initial promises when Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader in 2007.
“There’s nothing broken about printed books. A lot of people, myself included, tend to prefer holding a book in our hands and reading a printed book,” said John Warren, director and associate professor of the program George Washington University Publishing.
“Monopoly power”
Amazon’s book business has faced antitrust scrutiny over the years. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Amazon mentioned Amazon’s book segment, while the American Booksellers Association urged the FTC and Justice Department to focus on “monopoly power » of the company on the market.
The document obtained by BI is 25 pages long and is marked as confidential. It was used for a weekly review of activities at Amazon. The company does not publicly disclose its book sales, nor does it give a breakdown of revenue from each retail category.
In an email to BI, Amazon spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton said the company “continues to operate in a competitive bookselling environment” in which online retailers, national chains and independent booksellers have “experienced significant growth” in recent years.
The United States accounts for more than half of sales
The document reveals some staggering figures that show the scale of Amazon’s book business.
Here are some notable sales figures:
- Global: As of January 2022, Amazon sold just over $2 billion worth of books. Sales volume fell to between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion in the following months.
- WE: The US market is the largest for Amazon, accounting for more than half of total GMS books. It had over $1.1 billion in GMS in January and August 2022. In other months, GMS hovered around $900 million.
- Other markets: The three largest foreign markets were the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Each country had $130 million to $190 million worth of GMS books every month. FRIES, a geographic group including France, Italy and Spain, was similar in size.
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Japanese manga: The Japanese market for manga, or comic books, was large enough to appear as a product in its own right. Amazon sold more than $35 million worth of manga each month, or about 11,000 units.
And here are the unit sales figures:
- Global: Amazon sold an average of 175 million books (print and digital) each month during this period. In January 2022, it reported over 193 million units sold, but in other months it was closer to 170 million.
- WE: In the US market, Amazon sold an average of 87 million books per month during this period. In the first 10 months of 2022, the company sold 456.5 million print books and 419.8 million digital books.
- Other markets: In Japan, the company sells around 25 million units per month. The UK, Germany and FRIES markets were between 11 and 21 million units per month.
Mixed signals
Given that Amazon’s GMS for books in the first 10 months of 2022 was close to $17 billion, it’s likely the company sold more than $20 billion worth of books for the entire the year.
Although Amazon is a powerful player in the book industry, it is difficult to say whether the company is having a negative impact on the market. Global book sales increased by 8.8% in 2023 compared to 2019, according to industry data provider Circana. And the American Booksellers Association reported an 11% increase in membership and 200 new independent bookstore openings in 2023.
Retailers are showing mixed signals. Barnes & Noble is on track to open 50 new stores in 2024, the most store openings in 15 years. But Costco recently decided to stop selling books except during holidays or other special occasions. Booktopia, an Australian online bookstore, is struggling to survive.
E-books versus print
One notable data point in Amazon’s document is the difference between Amazon’s print and electronic revenue.
In the first 10 months of 2022, Amazon sold more than $7.4 billion worth of print books in the United States, while e-book GMS accounted for about $2 billion.
The difference between the average sales prices of the two book formats is also notable. Print books had an average sale price of about $15, compared to about $4.50 for e-books, according to the document.
Although Amazon has been a pioneer in the e-book space, this data indicates that e-book formats may not have grown as quickly as many industry experts predicted.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey showed that in the United States, the number of print book readers still far exceeds the number of e-book readers, with 65% of adults reporting having read a print book in the last few years. last 12 months, compared to 30% who chose an e-book.
Warren, an associate professor at George Washington University, told BI that e-books were once predicted to take up almost 80 percent of the market. But those projections fell short of expectations, as printed books remain many people’s preferred method of reading. Still, he added, digital formats represent an “increasingly significant share” of most publishers’ revenues.
Amazon’s statement
Amazon spokesperson Hamilton shared further thoughts, addressing the internal document and the company’s book business in an emailed statement:
“Amazon has a written narrative culture, which means that at any given time, thousands of documents are circulating through the company, providing information at any given time and with varying levels of review and accuracy,” Hamilton wrote. “Our mission is to inspire customers to read more and get more out of reading. We offer innovative and unprecedented reading experiences; the widest possible choice; options that allow our customers to read how they want, when they want; and a variety of affordable ways to read.
Do you work at Amazon? Do you have any advice?
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