Why e-book sales are starting to fizzle

Here's a surprise for anyone who thought e-books were here to bury print:

A report from the Association of American Publishers says sales of e-books rose just 5 percent in the year ending in the first quarter of 2013, a big drop from the year earlier when sales grew 28 percent, and an enormous drop from two years ago, when sales jumped a crazy 252 percent.

E-books now represent 25 percent of total book sales, a big chunk considering they've only been around in earnest for about six years. But it's still a long way from the kind of dominance feared by die-hard print fans who wistfully extol the smell and texture of dead trees — not to mention book publishers and book sellers.

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In a recent blog post, author Nicholas Carr lays out six possible reasons for the fizzling growth. Among them: We misjudged the advantages and disadvantages of the two types of books, and e-book prices haven't fallen low enough to capture the market. His favorite explanation, however:

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post prefers the theory that e-books are actually more akin to audio books — a compliment to print, not a replacement.

It's worth noting that a separate study by Nielsen, which came up with similar figures as the AAP, attributed some of the slowdown to a fall in digital children's books, and particularly "to the lack of a star performing title in children’s and young adult publishing in 2013 to replicate the success that Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy enjoyed last year," says Publishing Technology. Nielsen also thought the incredible success that The Hunger Games enjoyed in 2012 "may have been a one-off event that helped to skew expectations of the market this year."

Nate Hoffelder at Digital Reader says the crazy double- and triple-digit growth was unsustainable, anyway. "In spite of the spectacular growth of ebooks in 2008 to 2011, we all know that eventually the ride would come to a stop as the growth of ebook market share slowed," he says. "I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly."