The Publishing Industry Grew Nearly 2% Overall In 2019

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) released its December 2019 StatShot report yesterday, revealing that the entire publishing industry is up slightly year-over-year, having grown 1.8% in 2019 to reach $14.767 billion, up from $14.510 billion in 2018.

When those numbers are broken down further, the report revealed a few additional findings:

• Trade sales growth from 2018 to 2019 was flat overall, reaching $7.9 billion with growth of just 0.1%.
• The downloadable audio category is still growing at a rapid clip, increasing 22.1% year-over-year to hit $576.9 million.
• This growth is offset by the eBook category, which continues a downward trend by dropping 4.2% year-over-year, to reach $983.3 million.
• Added up, all the physical book categories (Hardback, Board Book, Paperback and Mass Market) accounted for 74% of 2019’s Trade revenues, or about $5.8 billion.
• Educational book sales grew 3.7% in 2019, hitting $6.8 billion. Granted, the Higher Education category dropped 10.7% from 2018 to see $3.0 billion in sales, but PreK-12 grew 24% to reach $3.2 billion.

It’s good to see confirmation that downloadable audio is still seeing massive growth compared to where it was in 2018 — which was also way up from its numbers in 2017. It’s that double-digit growth that has kept audiobooks in the conversation for years now as a publishing industry success story.

On the other hand, downloadable audio still only added up to $576.9 million across Jan-Dec 2019, so even its impressive and stable growth doesn’t ultimately add up to a huge part of the publishing industry’s $14.767 billion 2019 pie.