How Apple — and Millennials — Stopped the Rise of eBooks

As this decade winds to a close, Vox looks back 10 years to when ebooks “appeared poised to disrupt the publishing industry on a fundamental level.”
Analysts confidently predicted that millennials would embrace ebooks with open arms and abandon print books, that ebook sales would keep rising to take up more and more market share, that the price of ebooks would continue to fall, and that publishing would be forever changed. Instead, at the other end of the decade, ebook sales seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent. “Five or 10 years ago,” says Andrew Albanese, a senior writer at trade magazine Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99, “you would have thought those numbers would have been reversed.” And in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. “They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. “They don’t have to go to the bookstore. They can make the font bigger. It’s convenient.” Ebooks aren’t only selling less than everyone predicted they would at the beginning of the decade. They also cost more than everyone predicted they would — and consistently, they cost more than their print equivalents… The Department of Justice accused Apple and the Big Six publishing houses of colluding to fix ebook prices against Amazon, and although the DOJ won its case in court, the pricing model that Apple and the publishers created together would continue to dominate the industry, creating unintended ripple effects… “Overnight, because of this conspiracy, ebook prices went from $9.99 to $14.99,” says Albanese. “That set the tone for the future of the ebook right there….” While [presiding judge] Cote’s sanctions required publishers to briefly modify the agency model so that resellers could set their own prices, within a few years, those sanctions expired. Today, the agency model that Apple developed is once again the standard sales model for ebooks.