When Was Peak Book?
Meet the new opera
Have we reached peak book?
We’ve reached lots of peaks before. Take home video:
Production of VHS cassettes peaked in 2001, as DVDs displaced them1
DVDs in turn peaked in 2007, having been displaced by streaming video
Music followed a similar trajectory:
Vinyl records peaked in 1978, having been displaced by audiocassettes2
Audiocassettes peaked in 1989, having been displaced by compact discs (CDs)
CDs peaked in 2000, having been displaced by digital downloads (which were then displaced by streaming)
Books are harder to assess. Unlike films or music, there is no single, continuous, globally-accepted series tracking how many books are produced each year. So the question “when did book production peak?” turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer.
So let’s instead answer a different question, and look for the closest defensible proxy. For books as physical objects, that proxy is copies printed; these track print-unit sales over time relatively closely, since publishers print roughly and only what they expect to sell. In the best-documented large market, the United States, sales of print books peaked in 2021, when roughly 840 million print copies were sold.3 Every year since has been lower.
That fact alone doesn’t mean much. We hit peak DVD, but watch more video than ever before; same with CDs and music. The format may have changed, but the activity remains, and in fact is doing better than ever. So perhaps the real question is not whether books as objects have peaked, but whether books as a medium have.
Have they? To answer that, we need to be precise about what “peak book” could mean.
Production Up, Attention Down
If ‘peak book’ includes e-books, then we are nowhere near it.
In the United States (again, the market where publishing statistics are particularly detailed), we can see that e-book sales rose rapidly from the mid-2000s through the early 2010s, as dedicated e-readers and smartphones made long-form digital reading convenient.
We had no idea what was coming. Back then, when e-books were introduced, the annual number of new titles was in the low hundreds of thousands; in 2005, for instance, roughly 280,000 new titles were released. By the early 2020s, once self-published books are included, the figure was closer to three million.
That’s right: production of books, whether physical or electronic, has increased by more than an order of magnitude in less than two decades.
